Saturday, October 9, 2010

Trickle of Missed Honey

I started a fire from posters ripped from telephone poles:
Lost puppy(call him Cerberus), Jesus Saves, small barbaric child for sale,
8X11 sheets rumpling into flame like the final image of Eurydice
sucked and tunneling back down into Hell.

I set mouse traps by the sink, the oven, in the empty cupboards.
What could they possibly want from this empty place?
A trickle of missed honey, a grain of cocoa, one caraway seed.

Yellow beech leaves dance horribly outside in the smokey rain.
Dancing as if to laugh and torture the cedar boughs who stoically
accept them into their long-fingered webs, aromatic and soft.

You didn’t look back for me. I had already made it up the mine shaft.
But maybe that is our tragedy, you knew I would come.
You could feel the electric breath on your spine,
you played the tambourine beat the drum of a happy war.

Cowering, covered in soot, believing in anything bigger than me,
I wrapped a finger around your hungry talisman that bustled
And wagged in the wind that was always in your favor.

All these holes. Even failure fades out,
is eaten by the romance of time, turns to dust,
slips from your hands in strong gales.

The cadence of breath on flames makes a hollow song in the morning.
Some things are making me sick: heat, wood smoke creeping by
an open window, blighted tomatoes, torn bellows,
a pair of cracked leather gloves.

My regret is never having made you something beautiful.
Something to impress the unimpressible.
A grove of engraved trilithons laden with hand-woven silk tapestries
shouldered in by great women who offer rosehips,
cocoa, tobacco, orchids, peacocks, saffron.

My coffee is thick with grit and I remember how
I would wake up to your mouth on my ear.
Wishing now that I could spin that roving
breath into a fine warp, weave us a fine new sheet,
one we’d never get out of,
not even for coffee.

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