"My mightiest flights of poesy have / no power to conjure the slightest of her curves...

August 16, 2005

Irrelevation

“it all happened so fast” and though he’d heard
all about time slowing down at
such times it wasn’t so much that
as it got very full

when the truck’s front grill
slammed the pine trunk, didn’t think No
or holy Fuck or even Not Yet

as the left headlight
shattered sparked glass
into the black and bark
he knew
he was going to die

and his life never “flashed before his eyes”
with less than seconds of it left,
but the curious jolt of being reminded

—time that damn-fool Blake
talked him into that bungie thing—

—diving off the high boatdocks
at Beudreaux’s, that moment—

and what did shoot like a load of buckshot
through his head as everything in the truck kept moving at
sixty-miles per except the truck itself
was the surprising Anything is possible

because nowhere in his head did it say
this could every happen—if this what the hell
else was possible?

—deer could leap cowlike over moons and
out of the paths of oncoming trucks—

—babies grow angel-wings
and sing elvis flying through the air and—

—the other lives: country singer
artist doctor soldier saint stunt-driver serial-killer—

the half-moment when his head and the shatter-
-proof glass burst in a halo of cracks—before
his skull stopped moving at sixty miles per hour
but everything in it kept right on into the inner
windshield of is skull—didn’t think

so this was it so much as I could have been anything


(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2001)

The Lucky Ones

It is, perhaps, morning, and let us imagine the sun
is just breaking over the dream-gray lids of dawn.
It is cold, in the morning, this time of year,
and the oak leaves turn their backs to the heat
slowly, like iguanas. See—there, where the woods end?

Where the trees taper down to scrubs and weeds
and finally the dense matte of grasses and wild
anemones: this is where you see it happening,
when you think about it. A mourning dove sings.
None of the bodies in the field still bleeds,

except the few left bruised and alive and strong
to dig the mass graves. The green is torn and flung
over their shoulders, and they scoop out earth
like pumpkin guts. Did they actually long for death,
these last few, and they threw down one by one

their children and women, their sickly old like crows,
or did they look nervously toward the soldiers, poised
like scarecrows with their guns in line? Did they seem
to them like something no longer human, like meat
without souls? The corpses were arranged in rows,

like large sardines. It was done; the pits were dug
while rifles warmed their long necks in the sun.
If they stared back over the hills to the distant
walls and homes of their town, we don’t know about it.
About half marched back, exhausted, through the mud.



(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2002)

August 07, 2005

They Fall

The Indian-mint crushed underfoot
sends up a pleasing scent into the night,
into air thick with summer pine.
Their whispers fall away; the air drones
with fireflies like will ‘o whisps, ghost-souls.
Their eyes shine in the darkness like two owls’.
One last night. Summer’s done and now
the farewell campfire’s dead and damp with dew.
They walk on solemnly, slowly, steps imbued
with powerful importance. As they head
to the same spot as every night, the glen
across the stream, the shorter of them grins:
it’s still amazing—they’re both new to this—
but they’ve uncovered—God!—new ways
of being in the world. Both feel remade,
recast in bronze, shining like a god.
Above, a sudden flight of shooting stars:
the taller of them thinks of Icarus
(or—which one was it—was it Dedaelus?)
The clearing’s circled round with black-barked trees
and weeds that arch their backs, that stretch and reach—
The two boys sit on an old fallen branch,
take out their cigarettes with sweaty hands
and light them up. One thinks of fiery brands
and vengeful angels. One just smiles and holds
this stolen fire, this much-forbidden coal,
against the sky’s stern curtain with a smile.
Their eyes are burning low now, and they find
their fingers moving closer, then their hands
are clasped. A shot of heat-lightning fans
the silence, but they’re focused on
something like hubris, or like awe:
They are both beautiful. They are new.
They can do anything. And they do.


(from The Arcana Fragments, ca. 2003)

Hope Chest

If I could trap my hope inside a book
like a modern-day Pandora with her box,
whenever reality mocks
my expectations, I could take a look.
Isn’t it that way: no number of locks
can imprison disappointment, pain, and loss,
but even the feeblest grip
has strength enough for hanging onto hope.
(It clings to our limbs like hanging Spanish-moss,
hides the noose, and lines the lynching-rope.
Sometimes, she is cruel,
crying “Peace, peace!” when there is no peace.)
And yet, I’ll trust her. Let my doubting pass
and I will gladly play the occasional fool;
Better to release
despair and try than fear and never dare.
If I could trap my hope inside a book,
it would be her name. When things look bleak
and all hope is scarce,
If I just say her name I’ll gain it back.