Still Life

The alarm clock sits on the
nightstand by the bed
where you and I are sleeping.
Right above your head
our children sway in the swing

behind the old house. You watch
them through the kitchen window
with a jug of orange juice
in your hand and call them in
to do their school work.

My hand cuts through
the perfume of an unknown woman
laying in the bed of a hotel room
and I knock over an empty glass
as I reach for the alarm clock.

One minute before, the repelling dreams.
One minute after, the joined monotonous day.
How we have changed, and how alike we are.
Neither one of us wanting to get
up this morning.

DQ 11/26/08

After Qu Yuan

Wood paddles whip the water in
a frenzy of orchestrated chaos,
the drum repeats the one-pointed beat
-the concentration of the devotee-
each arm a reflection of next, each lung
propelling the same breath, breathing
the mystical word that parts the sea,
each heart calling for the poet’s body
to be raised from the undertow
which is the only absolute we truly share.

The world waits by the shore, the ordered
rows of buildings, the four lane highways,
the paper pushers, the pale skins.
But they don’t exist here.
Here is the narrow floating temple,
the unrestrained prayer of the athlete
who cannot taste sea-salt from sweat
whose skin reflects the alizarin chant of noon.

The sunrays are in blossom, the drum repeats
the arrow pointed beat, the water churns again
in anger, and there, under the chaos of the blades,
a white-robed figure looks up from the deep.

DQ 11/10/08

Film Noir

In those old detective stories there is
always a reporter in an overcoat
taking photographs of the chalk mark
that outlines where the body fell.
I imagine someone had to actually

straddle the dead and run the chalk
close –if not touching- the edge of the
contortioned shape, and I cant imagine
the feeling of nausea such a task
would bring about on the artist.

Our park. I went there today.
Someone had used a white chalk
to outline the shape of a heart
at the foot of the bench where
I said I no longer loved you.

DQ 11/08/08

Horse Feather

This is a horse feather,
white, the calm of clouds.
I saw it fall from the sky
a slow dart from antiquity
swirling its habitual pattern.

Its vane gentle across my lips
its sturdy rachis could
pen a poem or two about
the process of kissing or
stammering ecstasies.

I wondered if the mythical animal
would part the evening sky
with its pale steady silence
turn its crimson eyes in my direction
and rapture
me on moon-hooves

over the matrix of skyscrapers
wearing nothing but its ribcage
between my legs.
Nothing is impossible.
I once loved like that.

DQ 11/7/08