Bourbon in a Cup — Blackbird Archive

← v10n1, Spring 2011

If we are dead now, walking naked in heaven,

where our friends stand to tease and whoop at us,

I’ll say our marks are the bites of those insects

we learned to carry, not recoiling, but enduring.

Say nothing of the nights we did not touch, hours

we abandoned love. I smell mowed-over onions

in that grass, the sweat mixed with swamp-salt,

colognes, cigarettes, meat charring, flood tide.

If they ask what we did by the boats, we’ll say

we smoked, we swam among them, we ran away

and married—we signed, we paid, we were alive.

In my dream you enclosed me again, old words

fumed between us like mists of gnats, the unseen

not digging at my skin, not biting, but wanting in.

They will know us as we are, you said. Yes, love.

Weeds in our mouths. Ivy in hair. Bourbon in a cup.

memory love aging

Dave Smith

Dave Smith is the author of Looking Up: Poems, 2010–2020 (forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press), Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005–2010 (Louisiana State University Press, 2011), Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems, 1992–2004 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005), and The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). He is also the author of Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (Louisiana State University Press, 2006). Smith retired as co-editor of The Southern Review and Boyd Professor of English in 2002 at Louisiana State University. He then became the Elliott Coleman Professor of Poetry and Chairman of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, from which he retired in 2013.