Find and share the perfect poems.
When I worked in the steel mill the ceiling crane dropped a bolt at my feet the way the cat leaves his catch on the doorstep for me to step over it a bolt thick as a sparrow: the gift of it: it didn't easy as eggshell crack my skull. Walking underneath the el's same bridge superstructure when i first arrived in Chicago this is what I thought of a falling bolt, having to give up my cats and not be mad if the whole thing falls off track aimed at me. Buildings straight up from the street tall slough off their "Falling Ice," stand-up sidewalk signs like it's nothing. Buildings the sparrow's slam into, fall from— watched from the window desks— mistaking light for the sky, land up here. The cats probably have been put to sleep by age by now. No blame.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd...) riding the bullet train the view passes by so fast it is either a blur they say or —like night lightning strobes the raindrops to a stop in midair in that soundless moment— maybe from the train you can glimpse waiting there one of those famous petals stopped still in midair holding its wave to you in place. write us and tell us if this is so.
your shape is in the robe worn or not
a roominess of you folds into its cloth
a sachet in the drawer from which the air
of the place was taken fixed of you’re here
the smell has temperature and space
the wider warmth that buttered popcorn tastes
and not you it folds into a time’s clot
a sachet in a drawer personage of its own still you
*
I have to wear a bus to Rikers Island with
opaque tears up to my neck to get in to see you
in your two inch thick glass robe I have to imagine
you naked under to place my hand saying
I miss you against you where I can’t touch and love
has to break across insulating space still warm
I have to stand my day in the folding up put away
given you as time with you. I smell I need you on my clothes
*
I smell gunfire folded in to every turn
the city’s track laps into its hands on race
then files away not guilty I smell the drawers
of the records they keep folded away from stands taken
away distance doesn’t dissipate
the space between the bullet holes in you in me folded
you are the map I have to sleep with in my pocket to be sure
I know how to get out of here
*
your shape is in the robe the sharp creases
of its fold when you wore it blocked into
the counterpoint around you that even
folded stood you out to me that they couldn’t
see you that one day they would shoot
always folded into the robe you wore
gun or not phone mistaken or empty handed innocent
or not there is this fold on itself we sleep in
in the fabric
of this country’s culture
There is nothing concrete to grasp in
looking into the morning sky
The evidence of red-eye
flights east a plane drawn line presents
is not a wheelbarrow solid enough
dependency as day and night
carry in coming and going
You don't see the poem
saying anything you can't see in it
White dashes of contrails'
seemingly unmoving streak towards sunrise
disquiet the pale otherwise
unpunctuated blue of dawn
breaks it off Here is that silence