Introductory Poems 1-8, Week 1

My Russian History

You crouch, Ana, impenetrable as the photo in Grandma’s trunk,
a tattered, gray cave rock opposite the jewels in your corset.
You Romanov with your blue-blood grin in black and white,
I slash flesh like a jewel too; a Medusa smiling my stony snakes.

Look at me, Nicholas; look at me, Tsarina—
I porter and break before the burning palace.
I taste the soldiers near me: Red saccharine like Eden-fruit
but White as airy as unbuttered bread.

The rubies of my eyes roll back, let me groan
in my sapphires—like Alexei’s eyes laze turquoise—
Lazy turquoise.

Daughters, I share only these brazen stones: Olga and Maria.
The guards carry themselves and their French right into the twentieth century
with too much of that Je ne sais quoi and chests like young girls.


Ars Poetica

A sandstorm shoves the Chinese temple,
lifting the worshippers from the clipped stones
and reuniting them with the ancestors
to whom they bow their smaller heads.

A falling star paints blue streaks upon canvas
that the wind and earth crashed to create,
dashing between columns and teasing the sand
that howls and knocks to erase his work.

The star glides among the mossy stones
and lets his tail splatter a path behind him.
“What shall I make of this?” he asks the incense
that sifts through his icy legs.

Only the purple fumes know what sacrifice
the silenced but still-stony elders demand.


Party Crashers

Snow lurches in front of the windshield,
huffing and groaning to attract the car’s snoozing inhabitants:
A man and a woman, fingers laced over the black leather gear shift
sleep against the blue sanguine splatters on the windows.

He had to have his black leather interior, the bare trees
imagine the woman say as a slow grin touches her cheek.
It was a couple hundred extra, but you only live once, right?

The trees cross their limbs at these leaf-fallen people:
two phones ringing out of earshot,
resting so soundly where even the birds left months ago.

Nests without nesters, hollows without knots,
but two saggy-eyed humans nap, satisfying
the Lennie Smallian white compact Honda Civic.


Sirens

“Love” scrapes metallic oxygen down
my parched throat, dry as sweat on the sea;
phrases like “I feel x” and “tell me y”
tingle like the swollen after-sting of a bee
on the hands I raise to the mountains.

My concrete shoes ground me like my parents
that time I said “damn” in my neo-teenager tongue,
but Echo calls to the Narcissus in my mirror, singing
“All God needs is gravity to hold me down.”

God-send, I should have been a Greek artist
with admission to the elusive yellow muses,
gospel singers to the little “g” gods.
My own voice lures the artist to his death
upon the rocks, in a sea of torrential words.


Specificity

Remember the last week of December,
the last days of fall semester screaming ahead
of us as we prayed for the release of our senior-itis,
we stretched a path back from Christmas-nodding
without sitting for the amniotic flood of a new year?

The world spun without us, leaving responsibility
in its wake that flailed like squid tentacles.
We traced the North Georgia State fair with our toes
and pressed a hard mark to the ground in each space
behind us, wishing only to be as flies to any surface.

Our barely post-pubescent roommates, eyes bloodshot
by the beer we gave them too knowingly,
lilted around the stranger fluorescents like sheet music
to an angry director, thrashing his arms for emphasis.
They grabbed the rifles as trees to their tire swings
and shot at the plastic ducks, quacking innocently.


In Pictures

Silver paper planes float overhead,
whose holding cells break and fire
like lightning from the iron rod.
Why does the falling star gravitate
toward the choral pocket?

The poly-cotton sings about catching
every beam of light it attempts
and offers up its pretty without effort;
while children bid come the rosy rings
without knowing what that means.

Black come back; black lacks
light when white only strikes
the singers who try in vain to touch.
White lights on the washed walls
of our folly-filled classroom.

Could a cowboy really rope the moon,
why not a cowgirl with her braids
flying like doves in the lack of light:
black to white, she rides with the moon
and stars in her saddlebags?


Working at the Carmike Cinemas

I’ve been here many times before,
But I forgot the punch-line just like I always do.
Kids run through the archway
While the box-office homeless man
Performs a tracheotomy on himself.
A dog dances as the zoo sings around him;
That isn’t the film I came to see.
In the glass tree-house beside me,
Demons play with fire and poke inflammatory pistons
At Aeneas and Sybil.
Give me the Trinity of corn with
Snake saliva dripping marigold
And pebbles of melted snow,
But not in my voice.


To Robert Frost

An island anchors, flanked by two cities: a refuge but not exactly an oasis.
Where palm trees should stand protectively over a pearlescent pond
Instead flowers loiter amongst filthy lawn furniture and a ramshackle lean-to.
That shack looms magnificent and rustic over holiday-specific decorations,
Cozied and cozened behind a thin chorus-line of trees like a prisoner behind bars:
Visible in patches, simultaneously shiver- and smile-inducing.

Janus tends to this plot of land, this doorway, this gateway:
One face stares at Canton while the other dreams of the fictional town of White.
“Where do you live?” the Eastern face poses to the other, seeing only her road.
The Western face sighs. “The town between Nowhere and Nothing,” he says.
“What do you see?” East wants to know everything about West,
But West sees Nothing, understands Nothing. He wants only to know about East.

A single house sits on the road between Canton and White,
Holding its stance like a fortress protecting the liminal aura of the place.
The old and the new, ancient and modern knot together at this one spot
Where not even gods can decode the hieroglyphs of past and future.
West is the Ghost of Wisdom Past; East is the Spirit of Future Urbanity,
And the future of the driver depends on the direction he travels.