Filed under: poems | Tags: death, flowers, ghosts, Kali, rebirth, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge
I’m in the habit
of killing things,
smashing small insects,
tugging at the stems of tulips
and tying flowers into my beloved’s dark hair.
If you cut off my head
I too will be a picked daisy
and Kali will wear the blossom of my face
like my beloved does
a daisy chain.
Sever my head from my neck
and I will be just as dead
as a Christmas tree
or a rose torn from the bush.
I have piled dead sentinels high
in my beloved’s vases
in this fashion,
and tucked them behind her ears
so that they could give their essences to her.
I’ve pulled them gasping from hot cars
and nicked them from neighbor’s gardens,
and studied their mortician’s poses
in florists’ shops.
I have seen them in great bundles
stacked stone-dead like Jews
and in bunches still in the dirt
in open-air nurseries
with little white plastic labels that have
exotic names on them like
helianthus annuus and
hyacinthus orientalis.
I have browsed for the right kind in catalogues,
each picture like
the posie-photos
that the Khmer Rouge took on the Killing Fields,
the posie-ghosts on paper
still alive then,
no more saying ‘pick me’ than
the lawyers, doctors and teachers
who died those years in
Cambodia;
but still I do,
when things are good or
when they go wrong;
and compare their
dying graces
to my beloved,
and present them to her
in order to brighten her day –
dozens of dead, sweet-smelling soldiers
draped in flags of cellophane.
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, canvas, fingers, ghosts, hands, paint, paper, water
Whose hands are these?
that cover over other
points of light standing
on white canvasses.
Who makes them green?
Who holds the brushes?
What colors doe she use?
She fills the white spaces on the floor
like water fills a pitcher.
She leaves no spot untouched
by glorious fingers dripping specters
floated from her palette
on to paper and cloth.
Filed under: poems, sestinas | Tags: beds, early love, fear, geography, ghosts, hospitals, sestinas
in my room at the end of the day,
and you open your arms to my ghosts,
though in your presence they are afraid,
they are skittish things and only want to
search, to seek to find a word to cure
the shady hours that make me lonesome.
but when you tell me you are lonesome,
and travel the hallowed corridors of day
looking for the same ounce of treatment or pound of cure,
your golden and staccato words call the ghosts
to you, like the beckoning fingers of a new world, to
come make it tremble, make it moan, make it afraid.
but this slow-beating heart of mine is afraid
and steps in time to the beat of a lonesome
drummer, and tonight, I know, will have to
find a chest to lock up the things it felt to-day
and make sentries of the ghosts
and deny that there ever was a cure,
or that there could ever be a cure
and is afraid of the chance of one day being afraid
of losing you, and without you or the ghost
of your glances it could get very lonesome
and there on the calendar I’d unmark the days
since you’d left me with nothing to cling to
because love isn’t much to hold on-to
in a world of ills without cures
like a shop open all night and all day
and you reach into your pocket and feel afraid
because in your pocket sits only the lonesome
key to your chest of secrets and a dollar bill’s ghost.
but here in the ether, in this house full of ghosts
you will give me a hand to hold on to
and we will make our beds less lonesome
and forget about the silly and eternal things, the cure-
all for us, the troubled beasts afraid
of the troubled beasts that lie in wait for us in the hours between night and day.
no more ghosts, no more cures,
no more need to be afraid,
we are not lonesome, at least not today.
