Mary Ann Mayer
is a poet and occupational therapy consultant whose poems have appeared in many journals, both print and online. Her chapbook, Telephone Man, was published in 2005.
Her co-translation of Leonard Nathan’s poetry recently appeared in the German periodical Trans-Lit-2. New poems are forthcoming in Wild Apples: A Journal of Nature, Art, and Inquiry.
In 2010, she won Boston’s Grub Street poetry contest and was a finalist in the River Styx International Poetry Contest.
Mary Ann is a member of the Rhode Island Origami Poets, cheerfully littering the state with free, handmade books of poetry.
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The 8:14
Don’t say it’s not an art
to choose the place
you hope beauty will come to
and wait there while
your shadow lengthens
along the asphalt,
and another’s spills
into yours, into the tissue of your day.
Let the morning light be subtle.
Sip sweet coffee from the bottom of the cup
and wait. Beside the train tracks
and the rack of bicycles,
behind the yellow line,
the signal-sign blinking,
a young man with a back pack,
brown eyes sweetly vacant,
crosses in front of you,
then stands at the edge of a threshold.
The half-light accumulates; he does not blink
even as a girl drifts close to him.
She lifts her eyes to his, then lays her
bare arm on his sleeve,
wanting, it seems, his eyes
to fill with a need
she will shape,
then accommodate.
They make a listening pose.
Then they are gone.
Beauty, bleed into the daily,
collide more easily with the real.
Let all we gather, yield . . .
to begin again.
Let their lips have brushed.
Let me not go through time untouched.
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