Sigh

a little breath

            a little breath that walks

her breath,

                a waltz

a waltz in green-blue grasses

feathered high into the salted air

            slanted—                    a breath that tilts each

stalk

                        hiding in air, let’s waltz

opal eyes like pastures gone

                                    momentarily blind

This poem originally appeared in Switchback Journal (from the University of San Francisco) back in 2006. It’s part of a small series of poems I started forever ago about expressive gestures. Additional poems from this mini collection include Wink, Smile, and Leer. When I started the series, I was reading ‘The Seventy Prepositions’ by Carol Snow and enamored with the idea of taking a small gesture and diving into it from physical, emotional, and etymological perspective.