Graveside

Comments and criticism very welcome:

Graveside

Flowers aren’t enough
We start out going weekly, quickly
Fading into monthly, monthly
Into yearly and yearly
Added to the budget: Annual Bouquet, $50.

We give dead flowers to the dead,
Living for ones that are alive
Write elegies in a country churchyard
Kneel or weep into a napkin.

There is no place for the ancestors,
Hovering over us critically
Like bees before a flower.

And we wonder why our honey tastes bland,
Hovering over our own fountains
Of nectar and pollen, packing
Our throats with sweet and our leg flaps with powder.

We buzz around the city
And finally outside it,
Wilting flower after flower till we reach
A spray of roses, abandoned with love
By a wet, stone tablet.

But the roses are parched
Ruby-throated necks slit
And we waft a little lower
Where a small clover grows,
a red eye just cracked open,
yawning to the spring of its ruddy childhood.

5/7/08

Dust

I've brought this poem to Scribblers a couple of times, and now here's draft thirty-seven or something. Comments welcome.

Dust

I scrubbed and scraped and scoured my skin
Till most of the African dust came off.
It took most of the skin with it.
Tan lines from sandals fade after a few months,
And bleach removes dust-colored stains.

Forgive me.
I can’t always talk about the dust.
Sometimes I can’t speak at all.

Forgive me if I don’t tell you
About a calculating lioness
Crouched in spiked grass,
Or about the gazelle
That almost didn’t get away.

Forgive me
If I can’t tell you
About an orphaned child’s dirty diapers,
Or about her smile,
Or about how her bottom lip stuck out
When she cried.

Forgive me if I can’t talk about the dust itself,
But know that everything I say is stained by it.
(Or at least it ought to be.
Minds shouldn’t be like skin or clothes.)

Forgive me
If I show you a picture, instead,
Of someone you’ll never know,
Of a smile, or a tear, or a snotty nose,
On glossy paper.
Forgive me for using that photo as a weapon.

Canoeing Poem

I brought this a few weeks ago, and I've just made a couple of little changes. I'm mostly posting it for Katie and Tim, but if any suggestions come to mind, they're welcome. Karyn, enjoy the awkward line breaks. ;)

Town Lake

The loud anhingas
breaking from cool roost
(as we come near) fall
upward on the sky
with scattering of
sharp, black feathertips.

I stand unsteady
in the shifting bow
and stretch to catch and
clip a spray of blooms.
With the snip’s jerk the
petals break on me
and on the boat and
water like the wings
break on the sky.

Skin on a turtle’s neck
is like a bright maze
or a winding map
of park trails. “You Are
Here,” the eye’s dot says
and slaps into the
lake with breaking drops
that scatter like the
petals or the wings.

(v. 3)