cattle industry stages a one-day
strike, bankers to strike at noon
what’s a strike during the last week of
December when no one works anyway?
Her mother in a hospital bed scares her
(from a yard away
she stares at
the angle articulated, her mother taped & tubed
spotting the plush monkey, she says, For me?
watches the nurse ask about her
mother's pain, sits on the bed beside her
mother's sheet-
draped knee, is petted, stroked, soothed
says,
after 15 minutes, Go home now,
so we went)
 |
| Barbara Guest [photo by Judy Dater] |
Today
the children lived in syllables pushing rafts
pushing
themselves, the clime of heads on them the sun . . .
Loss
gropes toward its vase. Etching the way.
Driving
horses around the Etruscan rim . . .
Time
calls hoarsely for sorbets and gestures
of
sparrow . . .
throat
against darkness, we say a nose
examines
with dignity, gives thrust
the
painter uses the nose like a trowel . . .
I
thought of the white poem I had written whose face
might
even now be speckled with dust, and the white pen
used
to which I attached the poem’s name, “The White Pen.”
Surely
among the belongings in the kit where the shoe polish
was
kept there might be my “White Pen” with cream in its
nostrils
. . .
Hatching
away in her nuttery . . .
When
morning
finally announced itself in the shape of over-
head
spinning and clumping she resolved to go into
Zurich
even if it meant encountering slipshod vowels all
the
way . . .
The
road branched and ricocheted. The noise of pebbles
pinched
her ears.
Birds
sing difficult
songs
no other birds can sing. The spindle
whirls
and gossamer appears. Faces stare . . .
Let
that embrace last on the rim of the inkstand . . .
the
homespun
logic
of our twosomeness, a fabric time
will
displace the threads, a shrivel here,
there
a stain, the rotting commences like lanes
of
traffic hurtling into air as the sun comes down . . .
Seeking
the chute or drifting
these
rafts hourless in the breathing
admire
the quarter hour
brave
sofas surround . . .
A
child entered the room
wearing
a clock costume . . .
"In the flashes of identity between subject and object lie the nature of genius. And any attempt to codify such flashes is but an academic pastime." [Jules Laforgue]
Roan stained, Mike painted, I weeded; Jane & Kent returned the plastic
chairs on their way to pay tickets received 11 months post-infraction
for proof, photos of his truck entering & leaving a zona urbana at 100+ kph
how many more might be pending; half-price if paid within 5 days
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