Philomela

I was willing to forget treachery,

Contented with a game I played one night,

Til a rumor reached me of your anger

At the way I mocked you a summer past.

Did you become a sparrow, wounded so

By cruel words that your voice was torn away?

Remember your complaint, made without cloth,

Remember your impiety, your error.

Do you ever struggle with a shoelace?

You do so with hands I left on your wrists.

Do you trip upon stones hidden in fields?

You do so with feet left on your ankles.

Had I but wished it, you could have suffered,

The lips you pressed on my love thrown to dirt,

Your body (no fingers, no toes, no tongue)

Leaving its blood on the grave of your father,

Lying lashed to stone with a rope of your own hair

As you gasped out your last breaths, rats at your eyes.

When you contrive to lay with a goddess,

Consider the enemy you will earn.

You left with only a few bruised emotions.

A Reef

A red and grey striped wool cap sits on his head, holding the place of a miter,

a wreath of rose thorns, a wrought-iron crown. “Think of your family!”

He pleads against silence, the only implacable foe;

a hundred cymbal crashes and odes concerning beauty

wash against it without ever eroding from that towering citadel half a grain of sand.

He hears the waves and the screams of those that had been saved

(the others are less loud than the surf,

quiet as the dawn of battle in all its ravening glory).

The well-kept imagination of the man born for a life devoid of shorelines

hears the water creeping as a million rats creep through the city of the dead.

It hears the hull creaking like the floorboards creak in the shack of the Grey Sisters.

“The time! Earthshaker as witness, my captain, we must go now!

We are the last but the storm will not wait! Honor is satisfied!”

The sailor waits two or three moments then wails in animal frustration and leaves

the doorway bare. A thunderbolt teases across the sky, its roar closely following.

The captain’s hands are thick with tendons, his fingers are white

as the sun-bleached bones that fall in dustless deserts. He murmurs.

“After decades of courtship, my beloved comes to me

with a golden ring shining bright upon her arm. How impatient she is,

now that she has made her choice! Very well, very well.

I come now to her bedchamber to accept promises,

and to let her know the sort of man she has consented to marry.”

Carmen 37

Not every language’s lexicon contains a word for a deity;

presumably the speakers had had no need of one.

In every unmade dictionary, though, lurks a word for demon

(or dybbuk or devil or djinn)

and it is curious, indeed, that so many qualities of those malevolent spirits

are nearly identical to descriptions of dangerous and powerful men.

The impulse to create clinging, immortal, evil in our own image

is more interesting than the need to mold Great God to human frame.

Reclamation

Tightly closed, the windows ward away the frost

and unwashed hands press to glass to gauge the cold.

There, the oily memory of fingers freezes like a river, so

he rolls back over and sleeps for several more hours.

600 miles away on Interstate 40 a wizened man drives a 1976 Ford F-100.

He steers using only his rearview mirror as a guide.

Eighty miles outside of Flagstaff he careens off of a red cliff, his body turns to red dust.

It’s a shame, really; in a few moments he would have been young.

Glow

On certain days barely past autumn when the wind is cold and infrequent,

the pain of losing color and passion and desirability can be properly felt.

It is very similar to sitting for hours with no jacket and no blanket draped over shoulders

in a room frigid as the gravestone of a lover

because the mattress is as perfect as it will ever be;

or to viewing a summer night as a child runs to catch a firefly and in success

realizes that the long-sought quarry was not altogether lovely.

Instead of accepting that adorations often diminish with distance,

I see children on a lawn running in corkscrews to catch another, and then another.

They disregard a thousand bioluminescent blurs dancing freely in the dusk.

With happy voices, they race each other to snare the first insect that is as beautiful as light.