Issue Two

Mole

I know what you’re thinking. That this is just
a journey through the dark
leading to knowledge only a mole
could understand. When it is day

it is night for you, striving beneath
the party on the patio pushing up mounds.
everyone wonders what to do with you
and your wife. You do have a wife,

don’t you? Does she not find you
mumbling in your sleep in one of the innermost
tunnels, curled up, tufts of dust
blosssoming upward with each diminuitive puff?

Does she not let you rest? How hard
it must be, being the architect
of labyrinths you yourself get lost in
every now and then, an aficionado of grit

bumping up against roots, fence posts,
coffins. I like the idea of you. Blind,
inimitable burrower, nemisis of the worm,
you are the star-nosed groper

no one knows hurrying relentlessly to
and fro: seeker, self-absorbed
till thunder shakes the foundations
of the world and your query "Who is there?"

Becomes the requisite response
of others doomed to dig beneath the earth.
I think of you. My first mistake.
My second measures everything in tears.

Soliloquy With The Wind In The Trees

Honor the cold wind and the clear day,
their vast invisibilities of light and darkness,
the four truths of the earth,
the flesh of the martyr coated with tar
to burn more slowly, wood-smoke blowing in
over the city changing to April rain.
Honor the water relentlessly moving,
the blue flower on the porch erotically blooming,
the Appaloosa and her gentle yes
cropping grass in late August,
the silence of a night without stars,
the morning that endlessly wakens the world,
the nun, the night nurse. Honor
the winding path where the serpent
coils, the contriver of storms, the thunder that shakes
the house for days, the blood of sunset
over the gulf off the coast of Florida,
the taste of lemon, the scent, at first confusing,
coming from the apple tree across the avenue,
grass sprung up in the cracks of mortar,
this morning’s cry of the cricket
underneath your window, skin and scroll,
the lyrical imitation offered by the mockingird,
that mortal animal. At the wake
for Malcom Lee, honor the coffin
and the baby carriage outside the door.
Honor the chalice over which a red spell hovers,
memory, memory’s mole,
blind grubs gnawing into marrow bone,
the face in the mirror
finding fellowship with one of its kind,
the look of astonishment,
the praying mantis on the windshield
of your car. Honor the close of autumn and clean
wood cleft by an ax, water and the threat
of thirst at the back of the mouth,
the first pulse created out of love
for what is there like a hand
fone looking for another in the dark.
Honor this daisy twisting toward
Its spasm of speechless lust.

Untouchable Things

Mist at evening
Twists through hills, envelopes bare trees,
devious–satisfied not to seek:
beautiful to the eye that fought so hard to see.

Blackbirds in twos and threes sweep out across the field
and the full moon hangs
in daylight, a remembered moon, made up,
on the other side of the water tower. Its one light blinks.

Untouchable the smell of soap through a window,
the scrape of a shower courtain yanked back,
the next-to-last note of the oriole warbling
where the earth and sky–in a long hesitation–meet.

You wait too
for what doesn’t come, although the oriole in the wheat
says something definitive
about begginings and the moon complies by coveting the
deep.