Sometimes I’m distracted.
You might stand up too
quickly for me to follow,
move for the bedroom.
Something clambers my throat,
but you chop it down—
I’m not talking to you!
—so finally you don’t
have to slam the door.
I flatten along the floor,
replaying the last
few minutes, wondering
how serious this is.
The church could knell a death,
a whole neighborhood
of phones go unanswered.
I don’t hear. I see blank
wall framed in the doorway.
My teeth—bones in my mouth.
FORESHADOW
The sun doesn’t plunge out of sight.
Every right turn, my passenger
tightens her grip on her door handle.
No huge black waves absorb distant trees,
but more hair spills over her forehead
and she leaves it there between us.
I juggle maps, read signs and believe them.
Stars don’t flick on like headlights.
We’re not lost. We are not lost
until we find something impossible—
an ocean out the wrong window.
Faster and faster, the fastest I can go,
colors withdraw invisibly slowly.
I know what I know and don’t what I don’t,
and I’m exhausted with steering and gas
and pass on the right with my eyes closed.
Insomniacs and narcoleptics listen
sympathetically to one another’s stories,
night falling like a ton of feathers.
on Sylvia Plath
So much obdurate green surprises,
so late and far north. And such brightness!
Galaxies of reflected sun fleck the headstones.
The effect of this light is unexpected.
We imagined a gray place—a white blur
burning weakly through the dun scumble,
black trees naked in brown mud. Nothing
prepared us for such a lively graveyard
gleaming gold and somehow sustaining
half its grass against the cold. How clearly
defined our shadows, our breath in the breeze.
The poet isn’t here. No one expects her
resurrection. Everyone accepts whatever
remains of her as useless but to the soil,
the searching roots. We could exhume her
and find the hair of her skull lost its fire.
But look at the world at this level, lit
with a radiance attenuating February:
mark how the very grass resists winter.
but a lot of talk
ID clipped to a belt loop
and a badge,
on a retractable lanyard,
but I have things
digital planner in breast
to do and the means
pocket, laptop strap
to do them.
biting into my shoulder.
We told them, Go home together.
You are young and can catch one another
ablaze, but they were young.
they move among us, coal-black and skinless.
Look. They’ve left
soot smudges on everything
they’ve touched.
She and her blind men—she thrives on them.
She bids them aim jelly eyes
as if to watch her scalp slither alive.
They know they love their mistress and touch
their ways along the statues in her halls.
Her servants find her beautiful and soft.
They hark beyond one another's breath
for the whisper of her tail in the sand.
And when they hear the sighted arrive,
footfalls against the stone floor
evincing the weight of swords
and mirrors, they strain against the dark,
their minds and heartbeats pulsing one
in a blind prayer, a frantic chant of silence:
Grant to our ears, O gods, the hushed crunch—
static of our enemies' blood going hard.
THE MISSING CHARACTER
There should be another father
in the movie The Patriot. He should
be old and slim and have no dialogue
in his first scene—in the church
where Anne Howard shames the sons
of the community into the war—no
spoken dialogue: he should bow
his closed eyes and shake his head,
as one who should say, O boys, don’t
listen to this well-meaning child.
She imagines the brave will survive.
We should see him again at the end
of the second act, back in the church—
now on fire. Anne screams, and this
other father slaps her. Shameless!
This is the death you goaded those men to.
Shut up! Then he should relax his grip
on her shoulders, pull her to his chest,
his eyes swelling as if something in them
is expanding in the heat, until he has to
release even this last pressure, shielding
Anne in his arms, as if the flames are less
hot to him than to the young and make him
forget himself, as only certain parents can.
UNCRITICAL
I am only sad because I’ve seen
innocents outrageously deceived
that rabbits lay eggs,
that suicide bombers are martyrs,
that mommy can kiss and make it better,
that suicide bombers are cowards,
that someone else is to blame,
that they can never be so strong
that they won’t have to weaken their enemies,
that their bodies are ugly crime scenes,
that everything happens for a reason
that has to do with them.
URBAN HUMMINGBIRD
Some giant insect zips in my periphery, west on 32nd
from the direction of Royal on its way to Hoover.
Face it, I flinch
before I mark the wingtrails’ halo blur,
the slim thistle beak. Do the math.
Half my life in country settings
divided by five other hummingbirds—
all of them special
but none so surprising as this little marvel:
a little scraggly, a little smog-slick,
guzzling from funnels of state-funded flowers
the way a Hell’s Angel sucks a keg tap.
rattling off its axis and smashing against the turtle shell
floor of the universe is the smack of your quivering
fat cheeks, your tiny fists trembling with the tightness
in your throat. My breasts are sore enough now.
You should leave me alone, let me sleep, but no.
Your voice explodes out of the gulf between your gums:
My new environment is not beautiful and perfect!
Oh, you have no idea. Your stupid father isn’t dead
beside me. He goes on breathing drumrolls through
his spittle. I wish I were deaf. I wish someone
would scare one of us to death. I can’t help myself.
I know that if I pushed the man, his flesh giving
under my hand, he’d just rock on his side of the mattress.
You sound as if something essential is on fire. I’m the one
whose feet freeze outside the covers, and God forbid
we turn up the heat. I’m the one with bruised shins,
whose eyes are worthless in the dark. Keep screaming,
Selfish! Let something home in on the noise and come
cradle your fuzzy peach head in curved fingers.