INTERROGATION

What’s in the head

with the library?

More than a corpse.

Words meander

over circuits of breath;

a shade moves

up, then down.

Are you naked?

Stepping out from the shower,

a ghost hitches up its scars.

Talk, damn you!

Once upon a time
our eyes closed

in tandem, in silence.

THE SPECIMEN WORLD

A rifle shot comes

from the direction of Main Street,

but the sounding doves outside

the bedroom aren’t startled,

and the noise of traffic

hasn’t stopped.

I should pull the window shade up,

let in the eye-riveting light,

call again for help

from one of the strangers

who moved in.

The darlings keep busy.

They must be struggling

to make sense of the laundry

hung out to dry on the porch.

I will give the sheets names

for when it gets dark,

and give them a piece of my mind, too,

for their flirty bedevilment.

I’ve always known my husband
couldn’t be trusted.

He has hidden their letters from me,

in the magazines and books

left lying about.

I tear off their pages

and make my rounds,

scattering tiny piles of ripped up paper

like bird seed, throughout the house.

POEM OF DEPARTURE

            Let yourself go: mourn in the evening,

            with your curtains pulled open and your lights turned on;

Wail, from dusk to daybreak, straying across your neighbor’s yard.

Go into the hedgerow, safe for a blind bird’s sleep.

Look!  The moon ladles diamonds over clouds,

and still there is time for your wounds to heal.

            Pray for the starved and cold departed.

            Plead for capable hands,

feeling to reverse the sun’s dementia.         

            Let yourself go; trust the gusting wind

            and the window's elbow.

            

THE NAVIGATOR

First, the lost guy says, “At last,

a street I recognize.”

Then he asks, “Are you who I’ve come to see?”

“It’s not that I have to be,” I say,

“We’re doing things differently now.”

Inventing the chair, women used colors

men were afraid of. 

It worked.

Priapus dressed up, before he sat down.

I could see that the kids were busy,

out in the garden, weeding, 

so I said, “Alright, let’s got for a walk.”

We went around the corner.

“To fit me for a suit,” he said,

“We’ll measure this little world.”

“Then we can describe it,” I said,

            “of my own making, but another’s impulse.”

He smiled.

“You’ve rendered it well,” he said,

            “especially my fondness for light;

soon we will part the black flames

            on its horizon.”

THE UNCREATED LIFE

You considered shifting your position.
The windows across the room were open,
but you were holding your words in
for the visitor.
What might have happened
had already happened
and no longer seemed important.
You had moved through plenty of stories
before you surrendered,
when the voices and hands that took over
fit the comfort of light.
Escape routes shape
the created world,
as the outside heralds mercy.

CABOOSEMAN

In a country without good-byes,

the train doesn’t slow down at the station

for a small boy’s eyes

to catch up to its clatter,

but as I hurtle by I see

his hand wave when he spots me.

Standing at the back of the caboose,

I see everything the train passes by;

if I could reach my eyes further

into the distance before me,

I would never lose sight of the past.

On the station platform,

the boy stays angled, looking

into the fresh snow

that falls between us.

From under his cap, he watches me

quickly diminished by the very future

I avoid, not turning around.

To him, I’ve become an apparition;

escaped from the convergence

of time with space,

I float through wet air’s warp,

hands parting frontward

and head turned downwards, flutter-kicking

across the thick, white vertical lines

that drive past me, obliterating

horizontals.

Each instant a snowflake touches

ground below me, I see a soul

escape up, joining in

an invisible traffic

equal in mass and density

to the downfall.

These souls climb the falling snow,

grasping each flake.

Not one goes untouched.

As soul after soul moves upwards,                                   

their triangular yellow outlines bleed

into brightness.

In some, I can still faintly see

the blue circles and red squares

their shimmering contains,

like memories.

Mine have weighed me down.

I feel them tug me back onto the train,

and I am sped away.

                    - for Kit Donnelly

THE TWO-WAY FIGURE

No one claims to have seen the God
in whose image we are made.
       We too go unseen,
when we go as God.

The sky is fuchsia, orange
flames hem the black earth.
       Refraction and impedance
betray our whereabouts.

Whose persons do we move with now,
       where we are seen?
Our impression makes our likeness;
we are figures for ourselves.

TRILLIUM

I would not want to live
inside anyone else’s clarity;
we always come to be confused.
“Who am I,” she asks, panicked,

when logic fails to put a face on sense.
Trillium, I think, shocked
by the purple of the sockets
her eyes haunt.

Chaired alongside me, Mother fidgets.
Her father, dead now forty years,
and her brothers, out of touch,
are the men she talks to,

those present more oppressive
than the passed.
“I don’t exist,” she says,
turning from my silence;

who, then, is this other
that gains robustness
the farther back-lit
memory goes to work?

Presently, she laughs, recalls
her childhood neighbor
bowing, reins in hands, astride his horse
in a yard only she has seen.

Now she can reach to pat my leg,
for I’m here still, where dusk
puts a patina of fine light
on clouds I cannot ease.

ORTHOPEDICS

The leg is not what you thought it was.

No longer are you walking

to and fro the reconstructed

memories your mind wanders.

Well-lit corridors are a way

outside time, and their stations

hum with voices from around the world.

On your back, unmoving, day after day,

you begin to take apart

what remains of your person.

Someone else can have the sunglasses

and the wallet.  The watch

needs a timer and a reset key.

On one side of the leg, doctors have pulled

skin together with stitches;

the other side’s fish-like design

is a graft taking hold.

An external fixator extends

from foot to hip and keeps in place

countless fractures.

The tree is a painful fact.

The body has been broken

by its puzzle: pieces of bone

that float in the sky.

You recall the brilliance of this sky

and that it did not let you fall asleep.