In an S Chair/common book
                                                             for Rob

Arielle Greenberg

Chapter 1
before we were quite in love one day you described a particular peculiar velvet love seat perfect for reading Henry James.  one to other facing right arm laid over right arm in the belly of the S.  that you’d seen at the antiques mall.  there with my boyfriend at the end of it amid aluminum bathtubs.  dovetail joints hanging all over.  I said that’s the S chair Rob said and it meant all sorts of thing.  like our meant-to-be.  reading The Golden Bowl or something on the stiff velvet.  a mosaic of limbs and ideas.

Chapter 2
Nouns + adjectives I have in common with the women poets included in out of everywhere, ed. Maggie O’Sullivan (Reality Street Editions, 1996):
dark                 sweet               soft                              marble                       dream
feather             ghost               hair                              body                           wax
door                  star                 chiaroscuro                 lot                              gold

Chapter 3
What do we hold in common, my common-law commoner?
Common sense?  A commonplace sense of place?
More commonly cold, we keep a certain common measure
in our music, a common time.
One another’s common denominator at the bottom of things;
a common ground.  This S chair.  Come on come on

Chapter 4
                   your sweetsoft hair                    a ghost dream of feathers
                   waxy stars                                                                  a lot of gold marble
                   behind the door
                   our bodies chiaroscuro against the dark
                                               it’s such a joy

Arielle Greenberg’s latest books are her third poetry collection, Slice, and the creative nonfiction work Locally Made Panties. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, a book-length collaborative lyric essay, and co-editor of four anthologies, including Electric Gurlesque, co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, edits the series (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus, and lives in Maine, where she teaches in the community and in Oregon State University-Cascades’ MFA.