THE UNWAKENED
It was my father who spent
An hour every night after dinner
Teaching me the true sound of a word,
One wily syllable at a time. During those one,
Or if my cumbersome tongue wiggled
And waggled well, two-word
Scattergun sessions,
My father would fold me
Into a spoken word's magical wings,
Every pronunciation exacted, another feather.
During a summer family vacation to South Carolina,
He and I rhymed morning to night. The tide
Low, people half-clothed line the sand.
I have gotten lost before on long
Strands of shore taking me
Places I hadn't known were there.
BIOLOGY
--for my older sister
Poems cast off
Are my snakeskin.
This Christmas, you asked me
To give you some lines,
But none about family.
Leafless trees edge
The highway to our parents' house.
Cows, pigs and horses
Nuzzle alongside each other
While hungry mouths
Burrow into the muddy,
Hoof-stamped barnyard's trough.
May you and I survive
Serenely as the mountains'
Of frozen snowdrifts shed by
A lonesome winter sky.
FALLEN SHAPE
--for Barbara
Having missed yesterday's sun,
I am in no mood for snow.
Could we have our funeral?
I won't be living anywhere else.
The rasps of cars slicing their jagged procession
Through the valley float up the mountain.
Dead insects cloud the ceiling light.
Last night, after we went to bed,
Resting our separate cells and selves,
The image of my ghost rolled and boiled in the mirror.
But this morning, my left eyelid twitches,
And I refuse to part with you.
Our fallen forms are but lost hunches
Absorbed by God's solid light.
VILLON AND HEMINGWAY COMMINGLE
The laughing woman's skirt hiked to her waist,
Her broken pipe piss-full drains
A torrential river from her black bush; steams,
Puddles and runs across the subway platform's concrete.
The book held open to the full moon, I piss
Onto the cobblestone alley, Paris
The city big enough to keep me busy. Nod
To a craggy-faced woman's rug-shrouded mass, a knot
Grown from the gray-waved Seine's bank
Bench. A fast twenty francs danced
Out of my pocket, by the time I leave the Café Procope,
Where Fodor's declares Voltaire wrote
God into His less-meddlesome duty,
I feel pretty ratty, weave along spoked avenues
Exploded like stars back to my hotel room's wake-up
Call's repeated and forlorn buzz.