Scoplaw

Poem

Votive

the hand back-spasms,

from the just-caught wineglass it cracks,

the finger’s skin untouched

for no reason really, just dumb luck,

or the ignorant arrangement of things –

the glass left here, on the edge of a table,

set down to answer the call

of a woman I once loved,

the way one grabs, almost casually,

through the without-thought of the body,

for what cannot be called back.

Poem

My Sister of Dust and Mortars

I spend a day saying your name without

saying it. I arrange some keepsakes on a shelf.

Stone. Pressed flower. Photograph.

Photograph. Pressed flower. Stone.

Each a phoneme to build You-In-Absence.

As though I could hold something of you

in the pattern of my habits, by wearing

the shoes you favored, keeping

a dusty bottle of your favorite wine.

 

Poem

A trellis of legs and sheets,

the sunlight green through leaves

falling across us. It takes courage

to say no more than:

there’s little point, rushing

off to save the world. People work

themselves into and out of trouble,

agreements are made, broken,

while I live in the bounds of eyelash

and breath and half-sleep – the place

into which all things ground.

And in grounding, grow. 

 

Difficult to speak from such

silence, with the day’s petty weights

pendant.  I want to understand the phrases

that rise in me, to have grand design,

to know my work in the world

not occluded. Or just have the illusion

that things end cleanly,

do not have to be struck, struck

clean of myself and my loves. 

 

Her breath threads across my neck,

pooling itself in the hollow

of my throat, a poem into which is let

everything but doubt and frustration,

across which moves that blur

of evocation, of detail. 

 

She hums a line from an old love song

and bites my shoulder.

 

Poem

Summer

When in pain it is easy to praise, in pauses,

easy to praise even the uncritical ants which labor

under the shadow of grass, tree, myself,

here in the courtyard of my old elementary school.

The small garden, the slab of shale

which bears the shrunken tread of dinosaurs,

which, as a schoolchild, I measured

in finger-widths, hoping some still lived,

in the world unmapped, as we hope as children,

before the consciousness

of our body’s scale, before we fill our skin

entire, when we could endure

without knowing we were tested.

Poem

Murmur

I have left our country, closed
the border gate behind me,
and thrown the key back over.
Except the country was an open city,
from which I was repeatedly banished,
and asked not to leave,
and the key was a small house
with a garden. Or a handful
of solid acts – letters, trips
to distant cities, your love for other men –
fogged by intention.   I spent a set of seasons
writing it on myself, but now the story slowly
leaches from my skin, episodes blurring
into each other, small constellations
colliding. I still make out phrases
in the webbing of my fingers,
could-have-done-better
ought-to-have-(something?)ed
but even in bright sunlight I am unsure.
A woman long on her own journey
pauses, pulls her tangled hair aside,
and through my cloudy skin,
listens to what I cannot hear,
the muddy murmur of my heart.
She’s no expert, and I didn’t ask,
but she thinks it’s innocent. 

Poem

After the Plea

As the marshal orders him against the wall,
cuts the new laces from his shoes,
he's near-choking over his rage at wrongs,
and would speak, except everyone's watching,
perhaps with rawer deals.  He's done. 
No going back - to any moment of choice,
to the mouth of the alley, or further,
to that which was chosen for
him, marked by a growth-stretched scar
on his right brow, the tremor in his speech,
the slightness of his anger. Again,
he's stood waiting for the sentence,
for a last minute mercy, built on the hope
that these powers know, actually know
him.  And could do no better themselves. 
Again, he's gotten exactly what he's asked for
though myself - his mouth, who will soon pass
ephemeral as agency through these doors
into the warm sunlight of a gorgeous afternoon.
I know how it works, he snaps, and softens
because, after all, he's gotten
exactly what he asked for,
what he, fists clenched, had been made
to so-want an hour ago.  Oh, may you not
be blinded, bent or broken by these
least of your victories.

 

Poem

S.

I dreamt you alive, and today
to name these (silences?) inside myself -
dangerous.  Better to glide, silent
though my last days in the floundering capital,
past the loud parties of the insulated,
and not to wonder.  Is it wonder, 
this complex knot of my heart? Is that
what's left, absent name, shape,
this place you never came to,
now empty as anywhere else? 
Yeah, it's just like you said, back when
I kissed your neck by the ocean, "you're nice,
but somebody's got a date with a coffin."

Poem

I am filled
by confessions so common,
no one would wish
to hear them.  I have used
my loneliness as a lever
against myself. Across the table
a woman shakes out her hair,
looks elsewhere.   

Poem

Sleep

Draw bolt across door,
blinds against sight. Call
darkness into each room,
light by light by light put out,
as though you wiped names
from a slate, named this place
as your own – peace until dawn.

 

Poem

This Place Where You Are Not

The routines of my day
ground into a dozen half
snapped threads.  Reach
for the phone, and stop
short.  Save half of dinner,
then eat all ten minutes later.
Replace on the shelf, a book
you'd like.  Let slip
some anecdote, image,
story which once I'd save, say,
the one about the mouse
who in summer lazed
as others labored,
who, midwinter, warmed
those frozen others with
the warmth of words.

I must learn to be unready.