Two Poems

Lynne Thompson

Walking the Night

She went out of the bedroom.
She was no longer on the earth
    and thus her fragrance.

Mother didn’t take her keys
or ponder ambition.
    She wasn’t on the earth.

She was wholly recognizable
in her double-cut dressing gown.
    She may have been

laughing
as she floated above the earth—
    laughing and making

slant light large in her hands,
rolling it round and round,
    then releasing it.

She may have said goodnight
or good-bye;
    may have spoken only

through the storm in her eyes.
She was a sketch half her size—
    essence of quicksand—

parfum of can’t
linger here.                               
    She went back to the bedroom

and laid down upon exaggeration,
covered with scratches and fire.
    She was almost recognizable.


***


—last night, I dreamed
I was Frida Kahlo,

star-tips and tight earth, pond,
beaver tail, daffodil.
I wasn’t Frida but I was
just as unfathomable
being roots and thistle
and blood. Bulb of green earth,
womb of some wingéd insect—
deep lover, quite still,
still stone. In morning’s indigo,
in the steam, the sun of it all,
 I dreamed I was supplicant
before oceans, topaz, ideas
and lantern-light, unhooked
and needle-fine, copper-red,
                       like a cosmos—

Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon won the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry has appeared in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Southeast Review, Poetry International, Sou’Wester, Ploughshares and Connotations Press, among other journals. She’s rueful this bio isn’t pithier and is seeking suggestions which you can provide to her at

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