Month: November 2012
“Night-Goat”
I am interminably white. I limp, gasping and feathery, into your last blueness. I want the adoration of flowers. O tightly wrapped little things, cheeky reds, delectable yellows, how they close against me! How do they know my beauty’s all glam glitter over bone? …
“SAMARKAND”
It is as if the old woman in the square
raised her hand to you, and I,
the devoted master, packed you off
to Samarkand, thinking you would be safe
from her influence. There is no Samarkand
in these parts, nor dark old women
known by other names. What you heard
was your own voice, or maybe your mother’s,
calling you back. As life left you,
did you find yourself in the trolley
to Niagara Falls, in your braided uniform,
or had you shrunk to a child
playing outside your father’s surgery?
I am left with shards of memory,
film forgotten in a camera,
a ten-year-old photo of you,
lit by June sun, on my mother’s porch.
Could you have known, in the instant
I flicked the shutter, that you were gazing
beyond your life, beyond Samarkand,
that the look directed into the hooded lens
I would not see again till you were gone?
“A Room in the Museum”
In Teotihuacán, we walk on sheets of glass, thick enough to sustain our heavy heels as we tread the sky of the model Aztec city beneath us, scaled and laid out like a blanket. Outside, there are ruins. In here, things are complete, and we …