Mrs. B. defined, gingerly:
a little beyond.
The soul
sweet-talks
its way into the throng
of lung, ribcage, hip. The lips
are doorsill, in and out;
I do not know which-way.
What kills a rose?
My nephew asked, a young boy
living in the world,
hung to a thing called cellular.
Ah, the
real cell, a livid
child, cub of the little beyond,
dances its animal dance,
before something scurries
through our brain,
pollen-rich and budding:
the loveliest heart,
human, hurrying up its blood.
Should I not call this
God’s rose, mid-summer agony
we loved, cannot love, might
love forever? Alive!
The rose beside the paper box—
alive, after the beetles
gorge, under their hard green
backs, whatever does not quicken
far enough, deep enough
into the soil.
What kills the rose?
The bussing forth—
kiss me, she says, I say… abreast,
with garden pleasure.
A wasted whiff, miffing, strikes
heart, a little beyond.
Acknowledgment: American Literary Review.
—At the gravesite of James and Dolley Madison, near Charlottesville, Virginia.
Between storms,
an obelisk, a man, and the oils
of a late sun, streaming. He toils
away in the heart-cavity
of a field. A yard or so
from our ankles,
he soft-brushes the dead.
Lion-mane, luminous head;
hands, bristly as paws, tease up
the earth: five years in still
company.
They’re everywhere—
foot over flat foot, hair
wisp on hair, shoe buckle and
loosed linen: Sheol, Sheol.
Lord, how we bury, bless,
commend them to oak groans
and wonder: the universe owns.
Could it be otherwise?
We, swallowing the world, it
and the withering stars,
the carbon dissolution of a place
so intended. Once out of the race—
we, with a brush on the bricks,
leveling ages.
Sweethearts and weeds,
the man and his broom,
the obelisk and the small room
under, where no one lies,
sleeps, waits. I’d swear
a lost locket appears simply
from loving—gold in the crook
of his arm where dusk leaks. Look!
Full are the man and the field,
full are we under the sun.
Acknowledgment: Southern Poetry Review
Peel and
pare: the summer's
metaphors—and my hope comes to a cool
and common backyard,
to a dusk that dims the foreignness of shade;
—and to heart,
where we, too, at times disheartened, break
a mandarin for that soft, familiar naveling
of suns… A
fruit
guarantees a space, lush appointment,
pungent segment, bitter-kind
spatula—
a fruit wears intact
the integument of womb, of a homestead
we pried open leaving genesis
beneath, all those stories of our fathers and
their trees, our mothers' hands,
the sweet globes plumping.
Our thumbs are licked, the pits forgone;
the world shudders off its skin.
Tell me,
darling: couldn't we, as
heelbones press, stumble there—a heaven
there, where
our apricots, far-fetching
over a neighbor's plot, tumble in pairs,
or where geese, no longer northern, heart-
locked in their lost migrations, flock?
What a sight, if bones shifted—where
our babies? where our love?
If, as gold seeds hurtling, we bore homesick
grass.
Acknowledgment: The Madison Review