Marianne Lyon has been a music teacher for 39 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2016. She is a member of the California Writers Club, Healdsburg Literary Guild. She is an Adjunct Professor at Touro University Vallejo California
Love Song
I want to write a feverish love song
sing it to you
watch your agate blue eyes
flicker open
find myself inside of them
your astonishing smile
charms me
lays warm on me
I want to write a fierce love song
with a raw opening legato
like years, days, hours, together
when minutes slow down
hungry seconds linger
I want to write a fairytale love song
of pianissimo evenings
gazing out bedroom window
moon and sun
one rising the other setting
blending into strangeness
like dreaming
Love Song
I want to write a feverish love song
sing it to you
watch your agate blue eyes
flicker open
find myself inside of them
your astonishing smile
charms me
lays warm on me
I want to write a fierce love song
with a raw opening legato
like years, days, hours, together
when minutes slow down
hungry seconds linger
I want to write a fairytale love song
of pianissimo evenings
gazing out bedroom window
moon and sun
one rising the other setting
blending into strangeness
like dreaming
I close my eyes
try to conjure a melodic tremor
will a romantic verse
but of course, you
are laughing fortissimo
over back fence with a neighbor when
suddenly a lento of silence intrudes
and I begin again to fashion
a possible lyric that too becomes
stunned when your percussive stride
drums through front door
down echoing hall
bids my eyes open
to your half-moon grin
thick with sustained passion
your lips staccato-touch mine
I lift my chin andante
beg for lingering repetitions
Amazing Love
When it’s over
I want to say:
All my life was a bride
married to amazement: Mary Oliver
Mary, I have been thinking lately of
death and immortality;
to be remembered like a long-dead
actor on the screen and
lately most every night
I unburden these thoughts to infinite glitter.
Constellations hold queries
of never really having answers;
and when I look at these cosmic orbs,
I am struck with awe so deep
that questions of death become
less and less important.
These charismatic nights house
reliquaries of rapt memories
epiphanies of love
that have sung my life along
These memories stored
In twinkling vessels
glint smiles of compassionate friends
preserve warm guiding hands
Mary, what of the want inside of me
To desire a caress, to hold them long
What of the want inside of me
that passionately seeks amazement?
Twilight Stroll
Past neighbor’s singing fountain
around jasmine cluttered street corner
a whiff of barbeque intrudes
out tapering country road
where rattlers are known
to slink in thirsty months
past empty farm laborer’s
shabby quarters—
quiet as a monk’s cell
I reach for his hand
the same place
the same time
most evening walks and
the world magically tips and
the constant moon
rides up the nocturne sky
© Marianne Lyon
try to conjure a melodic tremor
will a romantic verse
but of course, you
are laughing fortissimo
over back fence with a neighbor when
suddenly a lento of silence intrudes
and I begin again to fashion
a possible lyric that too becomes
stunned when your percussive stride
drums through front door
down echoing hall
bids my eyes open
to your half-moon grin
thick with sustained passion
your lips staccato-touch mine
I lift my chin andante
beg for lingering repetitions
Amazing Love
When it’s over
I want to say:
All my life was a bride
married to amazement: Mary Oliver
Mary, I have been thinking lately of
death and immortality;
to be remembered like a long-dead
actor on the screen and
lately most every night
I unburden these thoughts to infinite glitter.
Constellations hold queries
of never really having answers;
and when I look at these cosmic orbs,
I am struck with awe so deep
that questions of death become
less and less important.
These charismatic nights house
reliquaries of rapt memories
epiphanies of love
that have sung my life along
These memories stored
In twinkling vessels
glint smiles of compassionate friends
preserve warm guiding hands
Mary, what of the want inside of me
To desire a caress, to hold them long
What of the want inside of me
that passionately seeks amazement?
Twilight Stroll
Past neighbor’s singing fountain
around jasmine cluttered street corner
a whiff of barbeque intrudes
out tapering country road
where rattlers are known
to slink in thirsty months
past empty farm laborer’s
shabby quarters—
quiet as a monk’s cell
I reach for his hand
the same place
the same time
most evening walks and
the world magically tips and
the constant moon
rides up the nocturne sky
© Marianne Lyon
