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Poems You May Not Have Read YetOCTOBER POEM
A train pulls into the station. Passengers break like billiard balls, glide to cars and buses. Ezekiel the pushcart vendor hawks his hot potatoes. This is the month of the dead and the undead. We wrap our hands around good fortune, shove them deep into our pockets. The moon's been reincarnated, a baby afloat in the amniotic sky. It makes us think about our next lives when perfection will be our undergarments. In our next lives, we think, our eyes will shine like truth's own saucers. But for now it's October, month of witches, of prayers to the old gods. We toss confetti, clap our hands three times. Crows cackle as they rise. this is from "Living by the Children's Cemetery" GHOST IMAGES 1/ The mind's a mad cupboard, blackened silver, cups and thimbles. The mind's a jerky focusing machine still stuck on the girl who hung by her knees. And within the camera [opening : closing] - fireworks. I mean, within the empty box the light's frantic, grappling with: the monk, the match, the gasoline. The mind is like-wise occupied, its light piteously stark, distorted - but which of us can ever look away? 2/ Into the angular cranium levers lift cold light, but how dark and small the box. And hands must hold the camera still, so stop your breath. [so stop your breath] That's how you'll coax it into the box, something bloody or blood-lit, a headless rooster or snipe - your attention split. Seeing the two worlds. this poem was first published in Crazyhorse --- a great journal I hope you will check out. DAKOTA'S OMPHALOS Bare-skinned and beaconish, sudden (like mushrooms) silos watch over Dakota's high plains. A stringent frugal beauty, ours, the attic window's bruisey glow, a vaulted stillness painted shut, but there you'll find the shoebox fat with photos, Granny slim, the girl she'd been aproned, sky-blown hanging sheets like sails that can't catch wind. Spirits here don't let things hold except the silos, mitered grain. Long shadows they cast out - and then at nightfall reel us in again. a version of this first appeared in Ecotone. |
From the Iowa ReviewCantilevered Bedtime Story Wallpaper farm, the girl with the duck, the friendly farmer's father-work, the moony mother's queer stare and the bee-hivey haystacks, the pitchforks, the curly cows by the pond. Elsewhere a window frames green light. Elsewhere, the dark-hall-doorway, the long walk to the kitchen's grown-up talking. The Singer in the corner, electric and shiny and under the bed, and under the bed... O happy wallpaper girl, the cow wants to give you her milk. The father's pitchfork is strong and serene, but what can be done for the woman in the fluttering apron who gaze is seaward, and elsewhere, and gone? Iowa Review April 2008 copyright, Deborah Bogen |
