3. Afternoon in Dublin

Five friends spent the
scant hours between coming from
one place and going to the next
practicing transience:
they are young
one stands on the grass of an
ouroboros and the others wonder
if she should do that, they
weren’t allowed to walk on the
green of Trinity College,
only admire. What
is the weight of a city?
It’s grit or history?
The bus driver’s jokes?
This castle was built eight hundred years
ago to keep out the Vikings.
That spire was erected five years
ago to show what men can do.
The friends wander trying to find a
bar, someplace atmospheric.
The rain threatens but holds.
Soon it will not be this way,
they will step from the edge of
time, build houses, grow old.
They walk back toward the bus station
to leave and cross the river,
humming silent and heavy
as a churchyard beneath.

+
Posted by t Jun 18, 2010

2. Forgetting

In summer I picked my way
through a coarse country
searching for a way
to turn poetry into memories,
but every field I entered
was an anthem for disregard
cattails shaking in the wind
as if we could all garner some joy
from those filaments.
Every man is a field of stones
and every stone a diamond.
I was promised the lgiht of
carbon sprung from within
but every movement of the
ground shot the sky full of blood.
I stepped through the fields of June
with my hands empty
and breastbone open
wringing memories from stones
green with the symbiosis of loss,
each stone in its cast-off place.

+
Posted by t Jun 17, 2010

1. Heatwave

I wrote you a poem.
I wrote you a thosand poems
sat you down on the sofa and
tried to get our minds off the heat
with new shoots I raised in the spring.
You didn’t listen, you were too busy
becoming your father
sweating there on the cuordoroy couch
like a block of parmesan in the sun.
Have I told you what a good-looking piece
of hard cheese you make?
That I admire the shade of yellow your skin wants
when it’s hot and you’ve been smoking too many cigarettes
and complaining about your father?
The one who left you in the park
that day when you were seven,
and forgotten, it seems,
until he returned with a newspaper and a
bouquet of tulips for your mother
forty-five minutes later?
You’ve never forgiven him.
But listen: I wrote you this poem to tell you
how much I like your sprung calves
and the way you drink coffee in gulps,
and also your hair,
which becomes a deeper shade of black
when you’ve been drinking coffee
and smoking cigarettes and sticking to the sofa
because it’s hot and your thighs have turned to jello
and the thought of your father makes you sweat.
The flowers were dying, you could see that
even then, and you weren’t falling for it
even if they were the same stratospheric red
as the sky above the park that afternoon.
He was leaving anyway.
I wrote you this poem
to get you to pay attention to me,
to get our minds off the heat.
Your thighs feel like tar
on that forest green cuordoroy.
It’s OK, I say, don’t you see
that I love you?
But my cheeks are tulip red
your eyes are what we learn:
two little boxes of sky.

+
Posted by t Jun 16, 2010
-Back