A Loss
The bracelet that you gave me
doesn’t fit, and because of this,
I don’t own it anymore. It slipped
from my wrist at a poetry reading
given in a colonial building.
I thought of returning to that
building to rifle through the box
of lost and founds. But I did not.
And I cannot explain this.
I would rather, I think, think
about this gift, and finger
in my mind the smooth brown
beads, than worry, as I always did,
about the bracelet coming to this.
Camel Poem
I saw a camel once; its mouth chewed
and chewed. I liked the extra space
its mouth appeared to make for teeth –
a rounded cliff, like the hairy curve
of a coconut. The camel, in service
to a film crew, had huge dark eyes
that, unlike other animals I’ve seen,
for instance cows and sheep, did not
look sleepy — but curious and alert.
All the features of its face matched in size.
The trainers paid the camel no attention
so he was free to pin his curiousity on me.
It was the kind of look you rarely see,
a purity; his body strained towards me.
Communication by the Remnants of Fire
When I got your note with the little
exploded plant fibers inside, in the muted
camouflage of the vegetable kingdom
and the smell of the swamp, but also
of your Chanel face powder that you sold
your employer’s books on the side for a month to buy,
the yellowed blotches on the paper
and the brown spot that framed
a transparency, made a collage.
The envelope sounded very old,
like the dryness just before disintegrating,
or the scratching wings of insects in trees,
and there was a fragment of a yellow print
obscuring your words which had been smudged
by a fraction of an ounce of Chanel Mademoiselle.
I tried to scrape together enough dust
to fill a bowl or roll a minuscule cigarette.
I thought perhaps that this was your intent.
Part of Water Series
2.
To make the image more serene
I drew geese.
I took the picture out
having, in the train, nothing to do
but watch the dirty tracts of land
behind my town, then yours, then
towns of people I hoped to never meet,
and studied it. And when, suddenly,
the cabin went black, I bent in
and lit a match to see the rubbery feet
tucked in and wings tilted as though
broken just a bit by wind.
On the back of a receipt I began
to trace.
* * *
When the horse ran across
the plain, kicking up
brown dust over the brown earth
my mouth, already parched,
got smaller and sympathetically drier.
A taste like thumbtacks
filled it. The thunder-sound
of hooves surrounded the theatre,
a sound dependent on earth.
I shrunk down in my seat
so that the big man’s head
blocked the screen, and squeezed
another square of pocket-warm
chocolate between my finger
and thumb.
I wished that the horse were running
toward me and not away for I wanted
to look again at its silky wet
head and cavernous nostrils.
I still had the dream, common
to girls, of horses.
