Out of the blank dark she comes to give it all away.
A world full of nights living in her eyes
Cigarette between her pencil thin lips
Pacing the chessboard floor
Desperate, the siren call of her past
Bleeding upon the altar of dead men’s words.
Closing the door on all the rest
mimicking tongue, parodying / the world – Edwards
A bird strange within the walls of my chest
is caught, who being hurt takes cruel delight
in humiliating me. Having learned a few
words, scant and hurtful, it mutters these,
mutters from the stone it sits upon in
the deep trap of my sinew-bound chest.
The scrape inside me, its wing against bone,
is ceaseless; its indistinct voice, constant.
What the harsh bird says I can’t make out through
the muffling walls of its unlit cell; hence
if there’s justice in its abuse of me,
if I’ve had it coming, I cannot tell.
If ever someone was close to me who could
interpret (or calm) its song, they’ve gone.
Epigraph from Rhian Edwards’ poem “The Birds of Rhiannon”, from the pamphlet Brood.
An inch of snow fell yesterday,
illumined the branches of trees,
erased curbstones, and covered the trash
that blows through the park. Tonight
has lost its edges and joined
a thousand years of nights. A scent
composed of leather and sweat
rises when I shoulder a door,
wanting in, or maybe wanting out
of rain and wind, out of a vacancy
I’ve learned to inhabit. Voices leak
down the hall from a half-lit kitchen
where someone is frying onions. Maybe
also a bit of beef and something sweet.
I slip out of wet shoes and enter
a dream past which is not
only mine. The tale’s more
than one family’s wars, trials,
and steerage berths. This frozen night
joins with other nights, the haunts
of a billion ragged dreamers,
selves adrift in a moving world.
After “Nature Boy”
For lousy pay, I drove a van
between Detroit and Wapakoneta, Ohio,
spinning it once in a white-out storm
and sliding up the Luna Pier exit
to stamp and thaw among lost souls
in the moon’s damp firehouse. Later,
I shot weddings, shingled roofs, herded
children and was called, in each job,
by a different name. Adrift. While
he wrote about love, eden abhez
and his family camped out below
the Hollywood sign in forties L.A.
Today, they’d be jailed. Picture his wife
braving the wind on dry nights.
Maybe she was the visionary.
What do I know? I’m tone deaf,
sipping coffee and reading wikis
amid the tremors of another time.
Only that he moved west and changed
his name and slipped a hit to Nat Cole.
That they had to track him down
to sign the record contract. That we want
to unravel love, to get it or save it,
though everything leads to return,
love evaporating and falling like rain,
like snow, while we turn wheels
into swerves and utter strange
bird cries, waiting for a crunch.
