Poetry Album

by Sue De Kelver

Some poems seem as familiar
as my favorite pair of jeans.
Comfortable. Easy, as if those words

had already tumbled around in my mouth.
Maybe not as eloquent, maybe not as wise
but as much a part of me as my breath, my skin.

As if the poet had opened his own photo album
and there I am in the midst his five-year-old
black-and-white birthday party.

There, in another of his yellowing and
slightly out of focus Kodak moment
is me, giggling at our first dance.

There again, two pages later, me
locked in his arms as we taste
that first sweet snapshot of love.

It's as if I am waking from amnesia
to this poet's description of our shared
and colorfilled past. For there

on his pages, that I cradle in my hands
there in the middle of everything he's saying
it's unmistakably me.

-- SD
©2001 Sue De Kelver

Sue De Kelver is a freelance writer and garden columnist from Door County, Wisconsin. She lives in the middle of an organic garden where she cultivates vegetables, herbs, flowers and poems. Her work has appeared in ByLine, Hummingbird, the Wisconsin Academy Review, Comstock Review and Libidomag.com as well as several collections, including waiting for poems, published by Fireweed Press