Filed under: sestinas | Tags: AJB, cobras, curry, elephants, India, mongooses, sestinas, sparrows, Thailand
Alli, I’ve struck at this point for weeks as gingerly
as can a man with a sword but not a proper
sword-arm, and none to be got between here and India
anyway, and those to be had sold by that stuttering sparrow
boy in Thailand hawking cheap fucks and eating peanut
curry and us here thinking it’s beneath
us. But never mind the gentle riders beneath
the waves we will skip not-so-gingerly
alongside. Forget the acres of peanut
fields in Georgia. Forget the acres of proper
-ty our foes have set ablaze. The sparrow
asks you as it flies away to remember only India.
But not your grandmother’s India. That India
lies on doors buried beneath
office buildings in Calcutta, beyond the reach of the sparrow
and the owl, both of whose talons may gingerly
grasp both rafter and rabbit alike, proper meals and proper
sermons enjoyed from the peanut
gallery by all. The preacher works for peanut
-s, as well he should, being imported from India,
and as elegant and bejeweled and proper
as an elephant can be while toiling beneath
a monsoon season sun stepping gingerly
through thick grasses too fatal even for the hungry sparrow.
If you catch and question a stuttering sparrow
caught in the jaws of a king cobra, he will lay it on thick like peanut
butter and offer any number of excuses, gingerly,
tenderly explaining he lost the way to India,
caught between the teeth of a “s-s-slight d-d-delay” beneath
the rainclouds of the monsoon season’s monsoon proper.
If you cave and rephrase the inquiry to the bird proper
-ly, the advice from the coy, stuttering sparrow
will be to – at all costs – put leagues beneath
your wings until you’ve found the man with teeth like peanut
brittle sitting in a marketplace somewhere in rural India
calling your name, though he does not know it, gingerly.
Do not approach gingerly; instead be a proper
little mongoose, in India, forget the sparrow and the sparrow
boy, and the peanut curry; search for cobras in the brush beneath.
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.
