I wear my heart on my sleeve,
or rather both sleeves, since
it's usually broken.
Sometimes when I join my hands
to pray, the jagged edges
briefly touch,
like a plate that fell and cracked
apart from being asked
to hold too much.
Other-lips whispering between my legs.
What they called black hole not-thing
is really packed full of secrets. A rebel mouth
testifying from the underside. Careful
not to let it speak too loudly. Only hum
demure in polite company — never laugh
Would you like to know a secret?
Well, I'll tell you one I know:
The Easter's Bunny's coming,
My mama told me so.
He'll bring a basket filled with eggs
And leave it in my yard,
And I will find it Easter morn,
If I look very hard.
I shouldn't tell my secret,
But I think it should be shared.
You ought to know that Bunny's coming,
So you can be prepared!
Alone with time, he waits for his parents to wake,
a boy growing old at the dining room table,
pressing into the pages of one of his father's big books
the flowers he picked all morning
in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus,
azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;
reading in another book their names he knows,
and then the names from their secret lives;
lives alchemical, nautical, genital;
names unpronounceable fascicles of italic script;
secrets botanical
description could never trace:
Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round,
Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned
By arches that with thund’rous trains resound,
And throbbing wires that galvanize the land;
Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand;
The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found;
The last burlesque is playing in the Strand—
In modern prose all poetry seems drowned.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night
An ancient People celebrates its birth
To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,
With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,
When you’ re up against a trouble,
Meet it squarely, face to face;
Lift your chin and set your shoulders,
Plant your feet and take a brace.
When it’ s vain to try to dodge it,
Do the best that you can do;
You may fail, but you may conquer,
See it through!
See Saw Margery Daw,
Jacky shall have a new master;
Jacky shall earn but a penny a day,
Because he can't work any faster.
To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’ s pale page.
Choose a beginning.
See what God yields and dirt cedes
when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage,
when your hand dips grain from a sack,
scattering it among engraved furrows.
This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
Don’ t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.
New Year’ s Day —
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Goes out,
comes back —
the love life of a cat.
