Find and share the perfect poems.
When I tell it, the first time I saw hail, I say it was in a desert and knocked a man unconscious then drove a woman into my arms because she thought the end was near but I assured her this wasn’t the case. When he tells it, he smiles, says the first winter after their exodus was the coldest. Rare snow came down, and his mother, who knew what the fluff was but until then had never seen it, woke him and said, Look outside, what do you see? She called his name twice. It was dark. Snow fell a paragraph to sum up decades of heat. He had no answer. She said, this is flour from heaven. When he tells it, he’s an old man returning to his mother.
Does consciousness exist only when
you name it? Was the double helix a
stranger, the nucleus the first brain?
I feel therefore I am. This is more
peptide than pep-talk. The tongueless
mood is sticking its tongue out at us.
The mountian wool is shaved into
vineyards. Without other there is no
self & and we are not always other of
other selves. Is the moon a self, is
wine or grape? The body & the as-if
body, taking time taste waking slow
rain healing grass.
We hold the present responsible for my hand
in your hand, my thumb
as aspirin leaves a painless bruise, our youth
immemorial in a wormhole for silence
to rescue us, the heart free at last
of the tongue (the dream, the road) upon
which our hours reside together alone,
that this is love’s profession, our scents
on pillows displace our alphabet to grass
with fidelity around our wrists
and breastbones, thistle and heather.
And this steady light, angular
through the window, is no amulet
to store in a dog-eared book.
A body exits all pages to be
inscribed on another, itself.
All this talk through a tunnel of kid gloves and landmines went underground. You were catching my limbs in sequels and spoofs, commemoration my organs with friends lost, whose names like patients’ names. Our clumped desire stirs and how when unwound, as with DNA, it sweetly wounds us. Hope in the right place, you said, is hope misplaced or no hope at all. But I say, in my dreams I dream, in my dreams I do not hope. Where were you when was I? Counting down the decades for the prize as victim of our previous war. Were you my cactus heart and kelp forest, a gluttonous hunger I ate myself famished, an app, a tower or two, and flew as a swan flies into a sand file that said, “No more monkeys dead on the bed”? In my dreams the universe anneals for tents that fall like mamas from heaven. And you were tablet and me pill, surgery and me drone, firefly and me shooting star, where when my clone was made interminable no illness could. And the space between raindrops a shelter, the mountaintop a lake, the gecko an oriole, the athel a bulbul, and I was seagrass and you the banyan.
How do you know that the pilgrim track Along the belting zodiac Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud, And never as yet a tinct of spring Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling; O vespering bird, how do you know, How do you know? How do you know, deep underground, Hid in your bed from sight and sound, Without a turn in temperature, With weather life can scarce endure, That light has won a fraction’s strength, And day put on some moments’ length, Whereof in merest rote will come, Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb; O crocus root, how do you know, How do you know?