Doug Tanoury Poetry

 The Moon & Other Metaphors


The moon is a woman I used to sleep with,

Always white, and an icy light would

Fall full on the birch forest that is

A chalk stroke tally of our nights together.

I recall those nights like leaves in October,

Remember the moonlight that shines on

The everlasting monotony of sepia and sienna.


Mercury light, quicksilver shimmer washing over

Black ice memories and a shadowy minimalism:

A black and white noir world of jagged lunar peaks

And dusty desert seas, bleached white and bone dead,

Airless and arid, I shivered in the chill of moonlight

And every night I slept with her, I was a tree

In a birch forest, shedding leaves in October.

 

The Tasman Sea


I have found that when confronted

With unbounded vastness that

Measurements lose most of their meaning,

Time/eons and space/light years

Are slices of a thing without boundaries

And too big to take in a single swallow.


I once sailed across the Tasman Sea.

It was painfully monotonous,

Like a road trip across Texas,

Except without any roadside diners

Where you could get a cup of hot coffee

Or a bowl of steaming grits.


The sun rising out of the sea each day

Painted the sky the color of cut cantaloupe

One morning and sliced peaches on another.

It was each dawn that connected

One day to another, and at the same time

Divided them into distinctness.


I once knew twin sisters

Steeped in sameness, identical

Right down to the patterns of freckles

Clustered on their noses, and

Like the days sailing across the Tasman Sea

It was very difficult to tell one from another.


The twins from years ago took me back

The way trains of thought often do

To my boyhood in Detroit, when the days

Of June to August were all the same,

When the sun rose above Belvidere Street

And sunk just beyond Burns Avenue.