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You insist
that the world belongs to a stony-hearted goat-god—
how every time we act, we enact
his vileness; how this is no
ecstasy, just a bad labored joke.
Your body in spasm
longs to strip the flesh, but if you do
there will be nothing left but the busy
bone-clatter of tactics.
*
I will listen instead to the river,
cold as time, smelling of blood-brown leaves.
Copyright © 2016 April Bernard. Used with permission of the author.
Of course the tall stringy woman
draped in a crocheted string-shawl
selling single red carnations
coned in newsprint the ones
she got at the cemetery
and resells with a god bless you
for a dollar that same woman
who thirty years ago
was a graduate student
in playwriting who can and will
recite "At the round earth's
imagined corners, blow—"
announces silently amidst her louder
announcements that the experiment
some amateurs mixed of
You know what I mean: In the instant of waking in bliss, the whole body smiles— He's still alive—She came back—They didn't mean it— We forgive and are forgiven—It all turned out— And then the hand claws the duvet, seized by the real, as all that's warm just drops. I know you know. But I seek a potion to make me dream of the actual with the same fervor, so I'll wake to happy facts: It's spring! It's raining! Robins! Someone will return a phone call today!
That voice—from the tv—that voice, thick smoky cheese, or, no— dark as burnt flan, sweet, venison-sweet in the heavy smoke of a tavern hearth, and hot as brandy. I served that voice for months, in a theater on 13th near Third where losers are the ones who crack first. I gave you azured hours, nights, and you placed your soul, pretty as a dead mouse, at my feet. Gutturals, the candles guttering backstage. Your voice went everywhere you dared not put your hands.