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a flock of owls followed me
out of my childhood last night almost caught me with their cruel blunt beaks and crueler loneliness came out of the trees like sheets of paper torn from a dismembered diary burned me down to the knees with their yellowed stare. words are not enough to describe how it feels to be driven out of shape, into prey nothing but the battered heartbeat for company back hunched from a 40 year cringe & ahead the empty house in a dead orchard the house I will die alone in a mattress waits linened in the broken glass of a hundred windows through which the breeze sweeps in the soundless wings. Wood frogs beneath the floodplain
lie leaf-litter frozen hard as ingots still and still so tight and hard the silver maple buds you could nail one through a plank while softshell turtles asleep as stones have paved the river's muddy bed for months still living? or breathless-dead? you ask it's all attitude, what you think and how you think it, a glass filled by half or just half emptied is this love so sadly stripped away by steely ice and clawing wind a sleeping seed or a cold dead stone-- you choose: do nothing or love this world and all that's living take that frozen frog that is your heart and blow on it like an alchemist bent on turning hopeless lead to burning gold. I tinder-gather the winter's dark variables
its struggling math and parentheses of ice. the equations no longer suit me nothing will satisfy me now but the spare zero of bare flesh. it's no longer about letting go the calculus I did not learn and may never. it's about sudden erasure, the bone-crack of ice-out unexpectedly on the Merrimack overnight seaward swept; the materialization of birds, songs truce-shattering the wind-walled and pacified silences; the way a fresh sword of grass cuts through all tallying thoughts as a lover's tongue slides through once-gated lips sudden parted. if there is a time to burn things that make sense, that time has arrived. if there shall be an altar to unpredictability, nest that holocaust in my heart. make me stop making the sense that winter humiliated from me. let break the slate, let it lie broken let shoes be discarded and the busted black shards walked barefoot. with the impending sun as my witness, I swear and swear again I am standing on holy ground with all ten fingers useless. a boy was eaten by a bear. the bear--if we must excuse it--was hungry didn't know better as is true for bears and the boy was reckless
as is true for boys, thought the bear's melancholy eyes its licorice nose harmless, stuck his thin head in the bear's mouth on a dare the bear blinked and swallowed the boy like an apple nothing left but a pair of sneakers and the wisp of a shadow the boy become part of the bear and the bear part boy. don't be shocked we stick our heads in things all the time are engulfed shat out become part of the story, our story, this world gardened with such tales at first the bear is our enemy how could you! we say be such a bear! then through teeth-grate and darkness we go down feel the bear-ness all around the weight like a suit of old tires the torturous hunger and exaggerated gait same next time and the next until maybe one day we stop dying so worrisomely spread out arms legs in this brand new robe feel earth under claw-pads honey on bee-stung tongue we roll and shake off the old maps into a dark grove the furriness at last--such a coat of anguish!-- flattering on us luxurious even the hunger now like an old friend beckoning us to a feast--how silly we were clinging to man clothes and lamp posts terrified of stick-crack and tree-squeak all this grief so shaggy so monstrous all this love so insatiable |
Poetry LogPoems are posted here when I'm ready to share them. I often don't title my poems. The date you see above the poem may be the date it was posted here and not necessarily the date it was created. To see more, click on the Archives below. Archives
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Unless otherwise noted, all content ©Paul-William Gagnon, Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs license.
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