Three Poems

Dear Sky

I will look at your back
if you come down a little closer.
God is too far to notice.
Come a little closer
so that beliefs may braid your true hair,
so that you may hear my whisper in my lover’s ear
asking you to step forward.

Don’t be the Seventh—
the one whose dress
some women grab as they spray
men with fragrance.
There’s always a woman
who lunges at you.

I was contemplating your spotted tail,
hoping for planets
to appear out of your gray ass—
don’t be the Seventh
or the last,
change your outside number
and your inside jacket cover, too.

Either way, the sea will reach you
and won’t mistake you for female.

There’s a swing hanging near you.
And on what is called Earth
there are other skies besides you:
why did books choose
just one name for you?

The meta, the beyond
helped me to see you from where I stand.
Which is fine
so long as you’re nothing but back, a posterior
with two shoulders,
long hair, and seated.

 

Who Is He?

That one
we carried
on two shoulders of childhood
and on many heads
of names and places
just to see ourselves
in autumn,
who is he?

A peasant
who carries
poems that plant doubt
by biting off certainty’s head
with questions.
 
He, whose
large branches
are our hands,
claims to dance
and scrapes the space
of our possible dreams—
his eyes
make us visible to air.

He who widens
a small room in the heart
then slams into the laugh
that drops him
to the ground
again, by the door,
this beggar of our lives,
who is he?
 
He carries embers,
burns himself
when he serenades
our loneliness,
kneads it
like dough
for a fire.
 
 

My Body’s Always Saying

Silence is a small thing with a beak.
It might not grow after dinner.
Its mother might forget it on her tongue,
and it might not know me when it’s old.

Or maybe I will conspire with its shadows
which I select as tour guide
for adjacent bodies:

a silence that doesn’t race a hare
or live in a tortoise shell
yet one I can find at a house door
befriending a threshold.