Monday, June 29, 2009

held in the outstretched hands of plaster saints

There is a kind of grace
in survival, in mornings
after, my mother's white Lincoln stopped spinning
in the intersection
the wheels on my Father's old Buick gripping road
again after rain
the averted fall from a willow over rusty metal,the skinned knee
the nail driven through the foot sure enough, but missing
any nerves or veins
the serial miracles of breath

it is morning, she is sleeping
Hank the dog is nosing through the wet grass
of the parkway
the expectancy of monday's six am
is still silent and waiting

and there is joy.

there is joy in monday morning
a tumble of laundry, half a cup of cheap coffee
and fluorescent light,
ratcheting up the first climb
of a wooden coaster of duty and day
joy in bandaged hands and traffic

joy in these five dreams in a silent house
put behind you like a good wind, like
the sun at your back, like everything
worth defending, like
the steering wheel in your chest
and someone's azaleas utterly ruined
cold milk and loose change
rattling in the backseat
a single shoe on the side of a highway
waking up alive, again

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

writing exercise 13

In the long silences, your moon-pulled tongue
Crashes against your teeth, salt , water and,
Unsaid words schooling in your rib’s reef
your boneless heart , eight armed
picking locks in a shipwreck

hot sharks in your blood, circling in the white
fall of the wave in your eye, remoras of regret
darting in their open mouths, the ceaseless circle,
the fins gliding below your skin.

Here things drift down, my words like
Wineglasses, like amphorae,
Unopened in the dark

Monday, June 15, 2009

“There is a winged-woman kneeling in the corner of the room."

her stone eyes steady on the opposite wall
the light stubbornly refuses to turn to gold
the lapis sky is what it is

granite feathers ache for a basalt heaven
for a dented golden sun,
she is no caryatid to hold the roof up,
no ornament for treetop or creche
she is no herald and does not speak

still I petition her with joss sticks and candlewax
heap flowers and fruit in her open palms
sticky with juice and flies, unbending and sad

I have chalked your name on the stone

here is the hour in heaven of your moving
here is the throne, the power and dominion
of your order, here is your name writ in
a script of men long dead, your watchtower,
your wheel

in a tongue of books, here is your name
a supplication to your face,your hands
immobile and impassive,
bereft lover,
last lonely guardian
the thin note of your song,
echoes in a garden gone to weeds,
across the black and white tiles
of an empty house

you last lonely angel that never fell


writing exercise number 12