Peace is a Virgin

 

       I.        Under the crescent moon

                  white bird soars, descends,

                  lost to my sight in the brush.

                  Canyon sage for a cloak, I shiver,

                  waiting for rodent scream.

             

     

II.         She was found yesterday; she left a note:

                  The world is flat again, visible, acute.

                  I listen to the news. I cry when they cry.

                  No one cries when I cry.

                  I want to go back to God.

 

       III.      They mistook him for a fag,

.                 beat him to death.

                  It was an honest mistake.

 

     IV.        The moon is: two-faced

                                       for some, she illumines hell.

                  

                   The wind is: golden flight on breathing fields

                                        for some, clotted dust.

                 

                   Love is:        a curl around faith

                                        for some, a bone in the throat.

 

   V.            Is this all I meant to you, god? We all pray in our own way.

                   Does a beast not know you have betrayed her,

                   as you have me? Anguish of her calf, agony of a child’s lament,

                   burns to flesh, blood on soil,

                   a cut to the heart hurts.

                   In my time before I go, I need to know.

                   Is this all I meant to you?

 

  VI.           In a dream I saw Her like a vapor of light;

                  I reached for Her but could not touch.

                  She wondered how I knew her name

                  as we had not been introduced

                  and She was not well-known

                  or ever recognized.

                  I told Her of the gilding

                  they paint around Her thighs

                  and the gentle nod Her likeness gives

                  to lambs and doves and children.

                  In anger She rebuked me,

                  for my familiar ways.

                                

 

Cremation July 20, 2020

 

My cool body lies

waiting for the fire.

They will not ask,

How were her poems?

What was she like as a young girl?

Someone dredged up my best skirt

a second-hand affair that whirled

around my calves

on solitary strolls under these Hungarian skies.

The heart is calm now.

It is no more mine, now,

than the tree that shaded me

as I wrote my words.

No more mine

than the dreams that marshalled me

across the dry plains of my despair,

up the mountains of hopes,

to cross rivers

       muddied from the elk waste (of my humour)

       clear to the pebbles and sand (of my inspirations)

       rough with the white water and boulders (of my challenges)

       stormy with the logs and limbs (of my lost loves)

       forbidding with the ice and undercurrents (of my fears)

Dreams opaque as a teary eye,

they dissipate like warm breath on a window

and perhaps leap onto the next

unsuspecting victim - my dream is your dream.

A box in the upper corner of the closet.

The closet in a house from long ago.

A dried rose, preserved. From whose coffin?

Whose wedding? Whose hopes?

This body is no longer mine.

The blood has stilled.

The breath has paused and holds.

Will one last thwack push out the final pocket of life?

Or leave it to expel

when the nerves jump, muscles contract

and the flesh fries in fat.

That breath will soar.

That breath was me.