punctured into the real
by your lips
on my throat, making
presence
the only possible
your touch a friend
I am getting to know
in intervals
Category: Poetry
Words are all we have
Shifting
All of us crammed in there
like buffalo standing before water at nightfall, looking ahead.
All of us shadows and shapes, quietly shifting.
That day being your face, and the constant threat of rain,
the air seeming thick as the ground. Your face
being the saddest thing I have ever seen.
Then the weight of our footsteps
outside the church.
The soft tread of us, our press into the grass,
temporary craters on soft earth and proof of us being alive,
a dissatisfied herd breathing quietly, waiting to act as one.
Miracles
I spent the whole day
burning and writing, until
they became the same,
as when the planet covers the sun
with all its might and still
I can see it, or when one dead
body gives its heart
to a name on a list. A match.
A light. Sailing a signal
flare behind me for another to find.
A scratch on the page
is a supernatural act, one twisting
fire out of water, blood out of stone.
We can read us. We are not alone.
Postulates
Love is more complex than gain
Though neither completely understood.
One remembers
He was fourteen years old.
To the fact of the memory
The memory stands
As an axe to wood. Wood, ourselves,
In the streamings and contours,
The roughened grain.
Make a mark on me.
A Lost Thing
You hate yourself when the object that defines you, or at least you
think it does, is lost or broken. It makes perfect sense: you are the
one who is lost and it’s your own fault, having left it behind in
a stranger’s room for where else but in the room of a stranger
would you leave it, inadvertent, shoddily careless, the enemy of attachments. Or it is that you, or they, rush through the room in a hurry – slow
down you hear someone say – rushing out the door
or past each other in the street so many months later, knocking it into
a thousand pieces, glass shattered on the floor, the frame twisted,
a strange disfiguration replacing the face – the photographic paper
marred by shards – and it’s not only the having done it that one
must live with – one’s own arm thrown carelessly through the air –
but the evidence of what was meant to be.
A Paper Crown
You realise some piece of you has to be pierced in order for the
almost unbearable desire to be slotted into place. Do you suppose
they do that anymore, cut slots in cardboard for paper tabs, the
small hats fitted around the heads of children waiting in line
for the play to begin, their lines circling their brains so they won’t
forget, ‘I’m coming my prince, my princess, I won’t forget you, I
won’t ever forget you’, and when the performance, and the school,
and the brick, and the street are memories that come only in fits, the
way crayon skips on the grainy surface of the paper you’ve folded up
for the crown, you realise what the embrace of what you thought
you could die for has cost you.
Tests
You tell your wife and children
you’re having some tests.
They’re familiar with tests.
You tell them
you’re having examinations.
They understand examinations.
You say
you’re waiting on results.
They know about results.
You are having tests, examinations, waiting
for results, for a piece of paper stating
how you fared.
You’re under pressure not to fail.
You are studying survival.
You are ill-prepared.
memoryhouse 