poem a day #something something

and from the way she
holds her foot when
her legs are crossed (how
the line from her leg to her toe is one
long, straight stroke) you
wonder if she is a
dancer,
if she has danced.

poem a day #...14? 13?

COAL

Oh. My black-bodied, boastful bundle
you have returned again, bringing once again
a body, a barely-bloodied bunch
and declaring in the tongue I
will never understand that you have killed it,
that you have brought it, and
that because you caught it and carried it
it is mine. It is mine.

poem a day #12

HAND, fig. 1

Detached, it is a seamonster's skeleton,
a mess of bones pushed together
by some well-meaning Victorian
who kept piling them in there just
because they seemed to fit. Ah,
but how it would move.
One, arthritic, is called
a different species, a herbivore,
its bulbous joints made it slow.

poem a day #11

SWimING
And.
When we talk we
are in the black Atlantic, your back
to the sandy finger of land and mine
to the waves, so
when I disappear I have been swallowed whole
and have to fight my way back
with my breath tight in my chest, the
memory of what I was going to
or should
say ballooning in my ribs, wanting
to escape and spoil in the salty air
and when I do surface
you are farther away, nearer
to the shore,
cresting the waves
and calling my name.

poem a day #10

PASSERIDA AT MIDDAY
Birds on a telephone wire like
periods when you fall asleep at your computer
buffet away, singing. Theirs
is a world seen from on high, where
shining cigarette cases whiz along
the flat, black, inedible worms. "I saw
a whole line of them today," a finch might say,
"Their many points of light like the sun
upon the water, and I became sick
sick with their beauty and song
I had to fly or sleep and did both."
And no one listens to the finch, so easily struck
by beauty where there is none,
so eager to find song where there is
only the variable hum: the horizon
shuddering.

And I would be like the finch, I
would be life-drunk and woozy
if I could reduce life to a patchwork
of light. But the telephone line is black
and the birds are always dark in the day,
those flittering periods.

poor excuse a day #8,404

NOTE: It is harder to write a poem about Andy Warhol eating a hamburger than you may think. I will return with my results TOMORROW.

poem a day #9

DO YOU KNOW WHEN THE MONGOLS RULED CHINA?
Two dudes, to pass
a test, ask questions by Mecca:
The Circle K.

DON'T FORGET TO WIND YOUR WATCH
When faced with that
which is most truly awesome
always proclaim "Whoa!"