The Voices Of The Dead Only Say The Things We Make Them Say
A book flips open
a random page
painted over and over
with the faces of your dead
An alphabet of ghosts
the words of the novel
replaced with
their eyes
Just last night
the book had been
about a woman
solving a murder
in some small
Irish town
Who signifies 'A'
and who got the 'X'
is perhaps a sort of
shade thrown wildly
in several directions
Is this psychology
a clever trick
of the dire mind
You sit in the chair
and by oranging light
you attempt to see
a thing in these lines
Graves are closed mouths
books in theory are
the vessels of dead who
cannot help but speak
Yet
these faces only want
to recount how
this woman discovered
whodunnit
They only stand for letters
they sentence plot
metaphor fails them
but they have emotional climax
and denounment for you
An ending that in some sense
could satisfy all that came before
Showing posts with label dead. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dead. Show all posts
08 January 2017
31 July 2016
Poem-A-Day #153 : Dead Bird in the Garden
Am I gothic? I've been accused of being gothic.
I'm going to finish out the month of looking back with a weird poem about gardening that is not about gardening at all. It does feature two obsessions of mine: 1) Birds; and 2) Decay. So there we go.
Starting tomorrow I'm going to take a friend's advice and start a series of poems about wood. Just wood, it sounds boring right? It is going to be AMAZING though, I swear. How much wood can a Michael chuck if a Michael could chuck wood? 30 days worth, if we're lucky.
Dead Bird in the Garden (4/28/05)
The sky is a gray sweep
of clouds making their brushstrokes
a perfectly windy sky -
Here the reel will speed up
as shadows blur on the landscape
if there were sound in this movie
it would be a lone viola -
Dip your fingers in
the rust-mud colored clay
that nothing will grow in
pull the rock from the shell of earth
roll it in your palms
put it back -
The heavy rains have
cracked and broken open
the small mound
the insides glow fiercely -
A small pool of black stares up
it has feathers that fold wet velvet
they are falling away -
Here is a rib poking out
a hip-bone the tip of wing -
A sudden sweep of air
across the breaking soil
the rest falls away -
A radish beneath the skull -
I'm going to finish out the month of looking back with a weird poem about gardening that is not about gardening at all. It does feature two obsessions of mine: 1) Birds; and 2) Decay. So there we go.
Starting tomorrow I'm going to take a friend's advice and start a series of poems about wood. Just wood, it sounds boring right? It is going to be AMAZING though, I swear. How much wood can a Michael chuck if a Michael could chuck wood? 30 days worth, if we're lucky.
Dead Bird in the Garden (4/28/05)
The sky is a gray sweep
of clouds making their brushstrokes
a perfectly windy sky -
Here the reel will speed up
as shadows blur on the landscape
if there were sound in this movie
it would be a lone viola -
Dip your fingers in
the rust-mud colored clay
that nothing will grow in
pull the rock from the shell of earth
roll it in your palms
put it back -
The heavy rains have
cracked and broken open
the small mound
the insides glow fiercely -
A small pool of black stares up
it has feathers that fold wet velvet
they are falling away -
Here is a rib poking out
a hip-bone the tip of wing -
A sudden sweep of air
across the breaking soil
the rest falls away -
A radish beneath the skull -
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