Another Poem About Your Beauty

by Joshua Coben

Each time you catch me
writing in bed and ask
if it’s another poem
about your beauty,

I smile because
yours is the beauty
undergirding all
I have that’s beautiful:

stone arches loping
across a river
that carry my causeway
smoothly over

or loops on the loom
where an ocean’s woven
and mackerel leap
the warp of waves,

ripping a seam
toward the horizon,
whose liquid hip
holds up the sky.

Joshua Coben is the author of two poetry collections, Maker of Shadows (Texas Review Press, 2010), winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Night Chaser (David Robert Books, 2020), a finalist for the Vassar Miller Prize, the New American Poetry Prize, and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, College English, Magma Poetry (UK), Narrative, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Salamander, and Verse Daily.