Poetry

Each molecule of air shines—
the angel having vanished—

and a skirt of shimmer flicks
off dust-dried plaster walls,

When we come out of the netted shelter,
smells of bitter smoking meat

from the replica road, where a vinyl girl
lies tucked under rumpled concrete:

no time to close her eyes.
If she could see, the dome of St. Paul’s

Early March, the town still given up to white.
In all these houses float the ghosts
of failures, relentless and unconscionable,
holding even the children’s hands in sleep.

He stalks the shallows slowly,
already with a buck despite his pace,
the way his leg suffers behind him.

I’m always finding grit between
my teeth. The smallest pebbles upswept

into languid tongue. The desert is so close–tiny
granules make bright constellations–such sharp

Probably shouldn’t say “full bush”
to someone I’ve just met. Sorry.

It’s like chopping cabbage in the mincer
after making vanilla biscuits.

On sunnier days a guy might admire his shadow
while he stretches between sprints.

A child might run you down with her bike
because your body was there and she panicked,

If I should learn, in some quite casual way
that Christ had come again, another way,
and you had kept this news, as always, to yourself.
If you had said He rolled my joint and, anyway,

In bed they reach for each other and draw back.
She knows he can’t or almost can’t, he knows she won’t
or will reluctantly. Afraid. She doesn’t want him
to fail. Or feel he has failed. She wants to tell him
you can’t fail me, not this corrugated body. Never

When Daddy began his long forget,
stashing his checkbook in the potato bin,
Mother tried to teach him new things,
how to dry dishes and shatter them away
while my sister Alice Ann, our tried and crude believer,
maintained we could rebuild Pop’s mind,