Two Poems

  You Alone Must Deliver the Message In a box marked “Let’s Find God.” In a box marked “The World is a Peaceable and Unknown Place.” In a shop for tea in the mountains drinking Shadow of the Valley Blend. Let’s call by the name Simple or by the name Nature our hunger. Let the day be a cake fat with promise and with sugar prim. All we be then is a ragtag assemblage of beaks and spoons like shill petals in which the cake shakes free its seeds. Let the box be Dream Ingredients. Let the valley be a shadow of the wing, the planet spinning in the lobbale distance. As a way of compensating for the skin we were forever losing, we made masks, riced paper to cheeks, arraigned fellow practitioners, boiled the baths of the uninitiated and saw heroes in their purity. In a town called Pardon, population 2,000. In a ring, in a tree for every year the forest lights itself on fire, whispering some things are worth disappearing for—   Deja Vu The dwellers here wear glances. To them, the blue in an arm means a theft; to me, just this is where I’m turning. + + + After rain the pavement swishes everywhere. Something in the oil rises in a puddle, and shuts my eyes. What am I but a listless feather, no concert, not to be touched. + + + Even a handsome traveler gets polluted. A few crows fly lower than the blimp passing between buildings. All day the idle urinate and waste their breath. Because this is not my town, or not my town any longer, I divulge private information to the eyes, a little knowledge to my mouth: I whistle, see there is a crystal basket domed perfectly over the fire hydrant, a pipe inferable, liquid clapper in the centre of a bell. + + + In Saudi Arabia the punishment for stealing is they cut one off. The punishment for treason, you can imagine. For disaffection the punishment is wind. For wanting? Cell. Specificity. + + + Or a cage one of the crows drops soundlessly down upon, and tipping its tailfeathers like a banded fedora, shits whitely on the dome, which seems to disappear in ordinary vision, the spurt of a tear suspended from the hydrant’s tip. + + + I know things the locals don’t and take them with me: there are stellar grapes marooned in the gutters and cats no pedestrian will ever brush upon by ankles. As I pass the smoke comes easily out of the restaurants. A memento can be this book of matches. My hands, when I’m not watching, are too big for my pockets.