A man speaks on the bus to another man who hears voices (I hear this man, and the voice in my own head, but not the man on the other end of the line) and I wonder how the other man knows it’s not real, and a thing he should ignore. And all the many voices in my own head persist, and I wonder which is real, and how I know the difference.
Tag Archives: poetry
Quite content with the alternative
I lay by my wife and felt her fingers,
and then all her bones together –
a skeletal, scary thought
with a cold wind blowing through it –
so I hastened to add the rest,
first the organs and then the
blood and tissues I couldn’t name,
and finally the skin and
mass of golden hair.
But even then she wasn’t herself,
so I started decking her out
with all her qualities, her smile and
hard soft-heartedness,
her way of leaving things
and that twist when she dances.
And how she cooks, with her million recipes,
and curls up in the corner of the couch.
The further I went, the warmer she,
and the drowsier I,
got, and God it’s good
to sleep with her
and not with that bag of bones!
Michael the Archangel on a platform of the station
Reaching for a tissue, I found him
in the pocket of my coat.
I’d forgotten we’d prayed to him
and I’d do it again in these days
short on light and breath.
But I hadn’t done it,
and now he stood before me
on a platform of the station.
Angels go where men won’t go
They come when you’re not there
Pray quick today before they come
For distance makes a safer prayer
L’esperance
On passing
(the) untroubled younger siblings
playing hopscotch – not only
untroubled, but joyous –
and remembering (being older)
one who had died, one who
their older sister
and brother knew,
and recalling, too,
the once and still
vacant look in their mother’s eyes.
A world of breathing above me
When I was five my father threw me in.
He said, You’ll know what to do.
But I didn’t and he jumped in.
And why is that like now?
What am I missing here in the air
now?
Acorn query
You could draw a straight line
between the branch and the ground,
and a circle around the silence,
with the nut in the middle
(after the flitting, before the thud
and thump).
Or could once have drawn,
for now the nut, uncapped, speaks no more.
It lies crushed in the soil
and the question it raised has pushed
the circle to the size of the world.
My own was the simple, Will it
hit my head? But its I missed.
I know it now as a silence too late.
Skyscrapers are tears are streams of light
Men would scale them with grappling hooks
But light won’t be hooked and men fall back
to the far shores from which they came
Dishes, a window
Yes, I know, I said we didn’t need one,
but later I was glad to pack it
with plates and bottles, and know
how hot it got. There was already enough
with a baby in the house.
Still, I was sorry to let go
the excuse to stare out at
clouds and weightless birds. And I missed
how warm my cold hands were.
Once I wasn’t speaking to someone,
two people actually, and as I washed
tears fell right into the suds.
We had no window then,
just a cupboard with cups
and a light above the sink.
3:10 to the Coast
This way goes a different way,
beautiful from above, past
a factory and windows
and now sheep and now mud.
Who am I, geese, wittily concealed?
Who am I, gulls, your salt sea revealed,
after water and grass
and stubble and mud?
Commuter
Amid the vast network of tracks and trains
one puts his body in and
it matters a lot whether he
puts it in or in front of the
train. We who ride know
the difference, but he who
has stalled and rerouted us
is blank, extinguished,
a smoke without a flame
