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Monday, August 29, 2011

Without Words

I'm having a really hard time writing in the last few weeks. But I've been reading out of my anthology a lot so I thought I'd just post a poem I've been enjoying.

A Postcard from the Volcano
--Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate dispair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Monday, August 15, 2011

E.S.H.

















She was born from a chicken's bone,
splayed from the crease of the why and
made from a wish for a friend.
She waited, cradled in a chrysalis
until broken legs revealed twin bones
of deceptively different sizes;

they sealed themselves,
entwined with like-minded muscles
sometimes pulling in opposite directions
but with blood that always ran
toward the same place.

Like irises that grew from one knotted root,
they were green and let themselves spill out;
the scars upon their crooked spines telling secrets
that can only be known to those
who are grown from the same hip bones.