ISSUE SEVENTEEN

Questions Posed to Myself During the Daily Traffic

What do you do if you find a newborn—wet and warm—inside a filthy

Planter? Will you reach out and hold him, wrap him in a rug or sing

Into his ear? What do you do if you see a blind man circling a sewer

Hole? Will you run to him, or laugh and wink because he cannot see

You? Will you let him fall, just as you once fell?

Yesterday, my mother struck my arm and said, “Close your eyes when

You dream, for the sake of the embarrassment, so if you fail, no one

Will gloat.” Just as I dreamed while skipping rope and said, “I’m

Going to Mars,” yet here I am, still sitting on this couch.

I am waiting for the last star to drop into my lap; I’ve made my

Hands like hooks, just for her. What do you do if you see a ghost

With feathered feet, rapping and eating a starfish? Will you be

Shocked, or rejoice? Be ecstatic, or finally go mad?

•

Twilight on a bog shore

I.      The Shore
The briars listened
Like the whitewash river hiding its ford
And the golden bog plants
Hiding in their dream-bawn
Their jelly and their pools
And their time-dense media.

The compendium of starry nights
The endless glut of a bog.
Where logs skitter with frogs
and reform.
Where magpies are captured in pools
like photographs.
The star-is-cold orchard.

Clams of silver light open
Bejewel the stuffy air.
Insects unsteady with pollen luggage,
And mono-colour flies, blue and green
candies.
Twilight on a shore of javelins.

II.      Gaining entrance
Star-cutters. Ursa Major
denatured, sucked into a pooter
And poured out of a glitter jar
To be bog-taxidermy. Star-gear joints.
The clattering bear-carriage
Wheeling out of a deep pool
on star-spurs.

III.      Comparison
The briars are captivated
With the trapper’s rigor mortis
and remedy.
A nun, her head full of vespers
Is emptied there. Emptier now
Than a bee. The squirrel’s discards
From the canopy are sobering.
She is gone now
into the briar slalom, frugal
with her dreams.
They begrudged and disembowelled themselves
for her.

IV.      Distraction
Any tree in another tree’s wood
Endears them to me.
A denizen of maple
in the smothered smoky yurt
under beech.
Practically underground.
The resumption after a tube.
The maple looking at
All its summer keys trodden on.

V.      Petulance
I hoard my prayers
Like battered up wishes, crafted
Episodes. A glum boy
Holding a steadfast candle at fault.
The brambles are sliding open
for everyone. The bog is yielding.

VI.      Bog-Fishing
The gardener
skirting the wall
like a bog angler
waters the fettered heaps
to drop her worm into.
If I stay here long enough
I might drive
Some nickel-tipped javelin
Into a star.

Persephone’s Discarded Garments

I kept some for myself,

because they seemed a part of her,

a slender thread I could not bear

to sever.

Other garments,

silk and velvet,

soft and polychrome,

no larger than a child’s,

like plumage of exotic

hummingbirds,

I offered to her friend,

who did what I had wanted to—

held them to her face, inhaled

their essence, murmured to herself,

“It’s almost like embracing her—

the perfume of her skin, her hair…”

We were like mourners, one week

since she’d left, yet she, alive

and well, had only moved away,

to follow dreams and visions

where they led, become an actress

in another play.

It reminded me of childhood,

when I’d find an empty shell

or recently vacated chrysalis,

and bear it carefully home

to add to my collection of sad curios—

sarcophagi in which some stage

of life or death had been outgrown:

caterpillar morphing into butterfly,

drying exquisite, vivid wings

to brave the air alone