Three Poems
In the rainy sub-
tropics of my child-
hood, horse latitudes
of dreams, of handmade
wishes, I would try
to dream of snow-fields.
But they failed to be-
come real as I lay
on my sweaty sheet
after we’d all been
outside late among
the invisible
heat-giants trampling
the unbreathable
dusk. The sun, gone down
behind the china-
berry trees of our
gunman back neighbor,
had left on the mute
bulging stratosphere
its faint pledge never
to fail us. I wished
and imagined it
would fail us just once,
give me a chance, I’d
take our one horse, ride
in the broad midday
darkness far away.
~~~
I remember that
our hell-hot pear tree,
so southerly, so
dark-green-minded, held
with a negative
theology—took
up that logic, so
logy with summer
Logos that it bore
small fruit which refused
to ripen; if plucked
from those green anti-
fundamentalist
branches, it cooked up
into a grainy
pear-pap tasting of
nothing, not even
threats or promises.
Surely not Eden.
~~~
(Persephonē)
The Cretan sky’s too
bright for human eyes,
near the empty road
on gust-beaten high-
lands, an old stone wind-
mill, abandoned, with-
out vanes, defends, like
a ghost fortress of
memory, all the
depopulated
myths and history
here and in the sea—
gone into the past
tense that time perfects.
Here’s a chance for us:
we can elude the
way our usual
hour’s saturated
by so much we did
not want to be ours.
The black opening
of a missing door
calls us in. For a
buzzing moment we
see very little.
Dark scent of honey—
faint, from acacia
and flowering thyme.
Thin gold blades of sky
piercing gaps of lost
mortar; a bee swarm,
growling, drowsy, is
swaying in the air,
far from sweet sources,
swarm of a goddess—
deathless refugee,
one who long ago
abandoned her bees—
interhovering,
droning with choral
voice their sephonay,
sephonay. Confused
with them, we under-
stand them—still mourning
their lost one, their lost
all. And who or what
will come to warrant
her existence now?
Word-sounds that want to
think their way forward,
interweaving and
hovering, humming,
almost resolve in
our ears. The windmill,
abyss of wonder
filled with our dizzy
longing to see, to
have back—sephonay!—
life-wise, those we have
lost, those we will lose.
(While we’re still living,
let me kiss you now.)
