Morning’ s mirage, disdainful & calm
as a mirror,
held the shorn bush that yesterday
flourished,
now lopped canes & a scant spitfall
of remnance,
confetti trampled in the clefts
of vanishing deer.
To touch its truth I punched my fist
into the chopped molest,
the boscage — withdrew my red sleeve.
Abstract that.
So proudly she came into the subway car
all who were not reading their newspapers saw
the head high and the slow tread —
coat wrinkled and her belongings in a paper bag,
face unwashed and the grey hair uncombed;
1
he picks a coin up
from the ground
it burns his hand
like ashes it is red
& marks him as it marks
the othershidden
he is hidden in the forest
in a world of nails
his dibbik fills him
2
From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in — black ice and squid ink —
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’ s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’ s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now
Lamps have begun to light as evening,
alluvial, fills every crevice in the courtyard,
fills Devon House, alone with its marble columns,
its verandas and esplanades empty,
the plantation gone, and the fields,
the courtyard a tourist attraction now:
glass ashtrays etched with boys
too large to be clambering coconut trees,
None are more familiar with dew
than professional footballers. From early
grades they are used to running through
practice drills and hurling their burly
frames through rucks while the moist chaff
of wet grass under the winter lights
softens their fall, accustoms the half-
back to the slippery ball and writes
green cuneiform on wet sandshoes.
And they fear it in the morning,
You love your friend, so you fly across the country to see her.
Your friend is grieving. When you look at her, you see that something’ s missing.
You look again. She seems all there: reading glasses, sarcasm, leather pumps.
What did you expect? Ruins? Demeter without arms in the British Museum?
Your friend says she believes there’ s more pain than beauty in the world.
When Persephone was taken, Demeter damned the world for half the year.
The other half remained warm and bountiful; the Greeks loved symmetry.
A man who’ s trying to be a good man
but isn’ t, because he can’ t not take
whatever’ s said to him as judgement.
It causes him, as he puts it, to react.
His face and neck redden and bloat,
a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead
and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children
but provoking hilarity at work
where one guy likes to get his goat
by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers
on his computer screen while he’ s in the john,
Did you ever see a bunny, a bunny, a bunny,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops so slow?
He hops, and hops, and hops, and hops,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops so slow?
Did you ever see a bunny, a bunny, a bunny,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops on one foot?
He hops, and hops, and hops, and hops,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops on one foot?
Did you ever see a bunny, a bunny, a bunny,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops so fast?
He hops, and hops, and hops, and hops,
Did you ever see a bunny that hops so fast?
