16 April, 2015: Paintbrush Left Overnight on the Ground Asana
READ A POEM
by Ted Lardner
Paintbrush Left Overnight on the Ground Asana
My wife’s yoga teacher talks about sunlight — fire like the sun’s —
entering the body through the solar plexus. I picture the cells,
some of them sobbing like old housepainters. “Hey,” they start
up. “We’re burning daylight.” Tiny brushers. Dangling like leaves
in the ash tree’s top, rinsed in cold light, the cells shoulder tiny
shadows, carry them, laddering up the walls of the house. Lift-
ing damp tarps in early morning, they whistle, placing the light.
My wife holds our son when he cries. She lets his body practice
remembering her heat, the outline of his foldable self. Sometimes
they sing. The parts they don’t know, they fake it.
“Paintbrush Left Overnight on the Ground Asana” by Ted Lardner from Tornado. Kent State University Press, 2008. Used by permission of the author.
ABOUT TODAY’S POET
Ted Lardner teaches yoga at Cleveland Yoga and is a professor of English at Cleveland State University. His chapbook, Tornado, is available as an e-book from Kent State University Press. His chapbook, We Practice for It, won the 2013 Sunken Garden Poetry Award and is available from Tupelo Press.
WRITE A POEM
Love and hate are two sides of the same coin.
Look up a poem you love or hate and read it. Now write a poem in response to it: a parody, an imitation, or an answer.