The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
Across the warm room
Shared in candlelight,
This look beyond shame,
Possible now, at night,
Goes out to yours.
Hidden by day
And shaped by fires
Grown dead, gone gray,
That burned in other rooms I knew
Too long ago to mark,
It forms again. I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.
Similar Posts
The surgical mask, the rubber teat
You seem to weep more now that heatSpreads everywhere we look.It says here none of us is well.The warty spottings on the figurinesAre nothing you would care to claim.You seem to weep more since the magazinesBegan revivals on the Dundas book.It says here you were most to blame.But though I cannot believe that this is…
Butcher the evil millionaire, peasant,
Torture the chancellor. Leave the ambassadorStrung by his thumbs from the pleasantEmbassy wall, where the vines were.Then drill your hogs and sons for another war.Fire on the screaming crowd, ambassador,Sick chancellor, brave millionaire,And name them by the name that is your name.Give privilege to the wound, and maimThe last resister. Poison the airAnd mew for…
Over the river and through the woods
She waits behind the bolted door,Her withered face in thirty pieces,While blood runs thin, and memory,An idiot without a name,Recalls the snows of eighty years,The daughter whose death was unexplained,Darkness, blue veins, and broken leases.Grandmother waits behind the door(Sight dims beyond the curtain folds)With her toothless smile and enuresis.Over the river and through the woodsTo…
Unmanageable as history: these
That offered no return, where dustGrew thick on every bolt and door. And so the worldChilled, and the women wept, tore at their hair.Yet, in the skies, a goddess governed Sirius, the Dog,Who shines alike on mothers, lesbians, and whores.What are we governed by? Dido and CarrieChapman Catt arrange themselves as statues nearThe playground and…
‘A equals X,’ says Mister One.
‘A equals nothing under the sunBut A,’ says Mister Three. A fewApplaud; some wipe their eyes;Some linger in the shade to seeOne and Two in neat disguiseDecapitating Mister Three.‘This age is not entirely bad.’It’s bad enough, God knows, but youShould know Elizabethans hadSweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.The past goes down and disappears,The present stumbles home…
The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollowand old:The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect andpublic endings–Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of loveAre but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient andquick,Waits only for those…