Poems

You let go of me I could feel it but really that is because I am used to my feet they feel like wheels. So when you let go it wasn’t the pounds that I felt unload it was more just a breeze, a breeze and a feeling of certainty at the direction in my feet.

At night I watch the geese fly over the parked combines there are prisms there that circle under their wings. You can’t see them as usual in the night but if you try you sure can see them in the wind.

I wish it could have been different. The holly trees are freezing but still there is green on the limb, and in the white sun and the blue sky even winter can’t steal the red berry away from the pointed leaf. I wish it could have been different I wish this could have been a long walk and the holly trees and pines and parts where the geese flock overhead could have just been our alone parts not when we had to say goodbye.

**

There was a music machine out there in the field I tried for days but couldn’t learn to work it. It wasn’t going to be right without you. It never would have been right. Wait as I did for days it could have played if you had joined me but I get it, that was a long walk for you and also I know how you don’t like it when you have to be cold.

**

Try as I may for days I never know how to say goodbye. It is an instinct in me unnatural as loons in the dark their lone spooky haunted cry. Please, please say no. Please don’t make this when we have to go. Go somewhere instead inside a cave for me and wait; pray, draw pictures, cook for yourself a stew over the open fires. Let me just get the words right heaven knows I don’t want to have to go.

**

Why couldn’t it have been different?

The blood that pains me is just the blood of the berries from the tree. For some it is poison, but for others it is just exactly the right juice that life needs.
12/09
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It was without poetry that she left
It was without poetry that she left him
It was without poetry that she left him
home
alone
Dying
Dying the deaths that death dies without a shape or cause. The vulture’s death, the death of courses, the kind that eats the eyes the eyes that see first before they burn. Burn the burn of burning done, done without expectation without vexation without sight. Because they forgot sight and they didn’t have far to go. Fallen out like rockets burned, just the fuel burst and black smoke left and the smell of petrol on the air. Burnt rubber. Eyes fallen out like rocket holes in the sky. Like holes in the sky eyes. The rocket eyes like fallen horses horses fallen out of the sky, horse hooves beating the ground a soldier’s march a sound of death of death brigade of soldiers marching along the horse hooves pound. The horse hooves pound that echoes in the sky, the skyeyes of wide, widened hope, of new eyed horizon and wizened direction of turbulence. Of turbulence the measure is the sky, the rounds you take, the rounds you take before they come and before they remind you that they are here to take you home. God-damned death bastards pretty as, plain as stone. Burdened, this home this homecoming this tramp walking and this road that they will go. The thunder, the thunder noises of snakes sound, of hooves pound, of eyes blink blink opening reminding she’s still got far left she’s still got to go
4/09