Among the living, I would be pelagic, a petrel teetering on fixed wings above a fleet of sailfish. Among the petrels, I would be a fulmar, & ward off threats to my one-egg hoard with deadly projectile vomit. I am held here by a morass of trivial recollections, like Rachel pinned to her camel-hump stool by the guilty pile of gods hidden beneath it. I remember a line in a novel I read decades ago that sparked an enduring self-consciousness about the crescents of dirt under my fingernails. I remember as a kid discovering a lone raspberry cane out in the field that was dotted with dried & shrunken fruit — that feeling of sadness at a minor treasure even the sparrows overlooked. I remember hearing a Chopin piano sonata once when I was so sleep-deprived that the mere effort of listening made my chest ache. The black and the white keys were equally painful. I’ve forgotten most insults & humiliations except for those I perpetrated, which fill me with a baleful light, like an all-night laundromat. I remember, because it’s still embarassing, how old I was when I finally realized that heat lightning was nothing but ordinary lightning, too far to hear & hidden by the curve of the earth.
Becoming Israel
Genesis 32:24-32
It’s the night before the reunion with my brother the savage whose people & whose flocks infest the land. I isolate myself like a woman in her monthly time. But through the tent wall, through furs, through woolen blanket & robe, another pair of hands find mine & begin to push.
This is contact almost at the level of pure symbolism, but still a kind of arousal occurs. Some slave girl, perhaps, ambitious for a piece of the inheritance? I bump up against a maybe hip & thigh — something warm & solid with just a little give.
Who are you on the other side of sleep? Are these truly hands? Are you even human?
By way of answer, I am crushed in a sudden embrace. A hot harsh breath in my ear: this is no sweet angel. Now I am throwing punches hard enough to stun a ram. Now the curtain falls away & I am face to face with the darkness between the stars.
Ah, but we keep each other close as adversaries must, skin burning skin, grinding into the stony earth. I will not be anyone’s bitch. I will never say Uncle. I will survive until morning, & limp fully blessed into the glare of meeting.
Poem for Display in a Vacant Lot
The concrete dreams
of bindweed & beggar-tick,
burdock & wineberry,
gravid mosquito mothers,
copperheads, a wild rose
equipped with grappling hooks.
The concrete wants to be loved,
not merely walked upon.
It wants to go home with you,
clinging to your pants leg,
or at least take a bite
your skin will remember.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
The concrete was our gift
to an unimproved land
where woods & weeds ran riot.
At best, we might condescend
to preserve some open space,
a light-green stripe across the grid.
But the pavement, too,
begins to bulge open.
There are no motels in this vacancy.
The flag of our alienation
goes down to kudzu.
Ode to a Shoehorn
A shoehorn’s a sort of
spoon-shaped chute
for the foot,
not for the shoe.
Or at best, a social lubricant
between the two,
with or without
the Freudian interpretation.
Boots are for those
who toot their own horns,
sporting as we know
the handy bootstraps,
which give the so-called
self-made men
a better metaphor for rising
to their own occasion.
Ode to a Wire Brush
Never was walking
a greater penance
than for one without any feet
& legs more numerous
than the corrosive rain.
And the to-&-fro of it:
pacing is a refuge
when you can’t stand still.
Do it long enough
& distraction turns into discipline,
the ground warms
& acquires the hard gleam
of an interrogator.
You confess, confess, confess.
Your tracks are covered
with a thin brown dust.
Lines for a summer thunderstorm
Distant thunder.
A common wood satyr
clings to the screen.
*
A close lightning strike
& a second later, raindrops,
the bleating of a fawn.
*
Through sheets of rain
at the edge of the meadow,
the dim outline of a doe.
*
Rain presses
on the horizontal leaves:
a random fluttering.
*
As I watch the storm,
a fly with quivering wings
explores my pants leg.
*
The lightning past,
the fawn stands on its hind legs
& bats at a low branch.
*
Towhee
Towhee
Towhee
Towhee
Towhee
Towhee
all through the downpour.
*
Their one day ends
in prostration —
orange daylilies.
*
The sky brightens,
but the storm’s darkness lingers
in rain-soaked leaves.
Fly in a Broken Window
Via Magnetic Poetry Online Kits (hat tip: sister AE). Also influenced by Tiel Aisha Ansari. Yes, I know I’m not an artist!
I was honored to have inspired the prompt at Read Write Poem this week with my “Blue Jeans” magnetic poem. You can find links to the other responses here.
While Shuffle Words compositions are constrained by the small number of total words, the problem with Magnetic Poetry Online’s Poet Edition (which sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) is the limited number of good verbs. Whoever put their word collection together seems to have been under the impression that poetry is chiefly concerned with nouns and adjectives.
Poem for Display Above the Urinals in a Men’s Restroom
Eyes front, soldier.
The general looks hard for signs
of deviation.
Don’t show too much interest
even in this poem,
which is probably gay.
There were trees here once
where you stand relieving yourself
against a hollow trunk.
They would not have known
what to do
with so much saltpeter.
__________
Note: Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate — a critical component of gunpowder — readily precipitates out of urine.
Ode to a Compass
I can still recall
my first encounter
with a compass in
the second grade.
It was shiny & dangerous,
a headless ballerina
with one wooden leg.
How odd, I thought,
that we should entrust
the drawing of circles
to something so asymmetrical.
And what to do
about that pinhole
at the center of the paper?
It seemed flawed
& unnecessary, like a seed
for a stone. I wanted
a way to make
a circle from without,
like shaping a pot
on a wheel. I had seen
hawks spiral
around an updraft
with nothing more
than a slight adjustment
to the wingtips.
Shouldn’t we
who are descended
from the trees
be able to free-hand
perfect circles,
simply by letting
the mind go blank
as a target?
The compass is a crutch.
Restore its missing leg
so it can return to
its first life as
a gnomon:
stationary,
circled by the sun.
Ode to a Hive Tool
You need a key for entering where there is no door.
You are much too full of your mammal self
to fit through the always-open entryway
& in any case would have no idea
how to execute a waggle dance,
which looks like sun-drugged madness to you,
looming over the brood box with your angry halo.
You need the hive tool — a burglar’s jimmy —
to prize the honey-heavy frames
from the super, where they hang
for all the world like file folders,
an archive of everything that blooms.
You bring your smoker, of course,
stuffed with straw you pilfered
from some poor scarecrow.
With tear gas & face shield you come,
gloved & booted,
walking gingerly as a boy with his first erection,
praying for the insurgency to die down.