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Fine Lines
Cancer is writing a play above your arching ribs.
Maelstrom, Behemoth and vertigo under the ghost
of rigid sheets; I lift the storm to find your hand.
My eyes refuse soliloquies as if two birds
are trapped in a small brown bag.
Losing a breast is losing a lot --
and I won't nurse you with cursory lies.
We've always discussed our deaths
as chapters of awkward grace.
A white picket fence of porcelain skin
is merely a line in paperback books.
The end of the body's a folding chair.
It catches a thumb, increases the pulse,
enlivens the bend, demands that a river be found.
Distinctions in Geography
Ours is a chalk blue sky in a dainty town
with only tiny mail flags
for the color of blood in the street.
We can't imagine soldiers
storming through a door,
city buses riding with a stewing bomb.
Can't imagine bunkers in a country ditch
where rabbits hide to raid
a garden full of greens.
Can't imagine massive graves
that form inside a marketplace.
We can't imagine living hell
and signing up for heaven's gate
on premises of sheer escape,
forcing rhyme in godless worlds
with dynamite and martyrdom.
Our biggest fight at city hall
concerns a Wal-Mart moving in,
displacing a diner, scrapping a farm,
tarring a quiet, dusty road.
Elsewhere poets write a dirge
for victims of a massacre and
blowing grass on Walden Pond
is just a dot in outer space.
Elsewhere someone hands a child a real gun
in lieu of a lunch box for school --
he reads the cufflinks of the stars
as swastikas and maps become
a scar across another wound.
In a playground of rubble and waste,
young bones, so young
collect the brass of bullet shells
like Matchbox cars and Lego blocks.
Pied-à-terre
It's proper you passed in a month
of crumbling reeds, crushed petals,
paper palms of leaning oaks.
For we are cupped in gutters too,
gathered at the sharp lip of your grave,
wordless and drained --
wishing hard and loud
for another chance to fill a vase,
arrange these impermanent buds.
You'd say the job of a soul
is to stare in cracks of grief's abyss:
I fish for a silver dime,
slices of an opaque moon
thin as soap scum over lapis lazuli.
Veils of tears should lift
like a shirt, then skin
should rise from bone like cloth.
Our thirst is now your peace.
The body, you'd say,
is only a box -- is only
a tired shoe -- is only one shell
in a chalice of pulsing waves.
What's a hole in the world to us
is a logical passage of verse
to those with faith in the poem,
in a cadence beyond fingers and toes.
So many lamps come
in the shape of a death.
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