Fireflies follow in my wake.
Their on-off on-off grace
is only missing the heat
to make them into suns.
For that, for me, they’ll chase.
I’ll run
until someone
forgives me.
Posts Tagged ‘imagery’
[fireflies follow]
June 29th, 2010Uncovered
June 27th, 2010Uncovered
His keffiyeh’s a water clock
counting time with slips of hair
that crowd and crouch among themselves
even as they tumble through air.
Colored crudely in that darkness,
it silvers in the locker room.
This ordinary ceremony
of grooming that my eyes make new.
[missing stanza]
He wraps it up in doubled loops.
Infinitied. Haloed. Imbued.
Changing Room
June 14th, 2010Changing Room
It middles through an hourglass,
tumbling among itself
even as it tumbles through air:
umbilicus of hair.
The tropics of keffiyeh
nourish a darkness shining through.
This ordinary ceremony of undoing
that my eyes make new.
Muslim girls will uncover their faces
before they uncover their hair.
Else, we’d be lost forever;
their curls suggest far too many places.
It wraps in zeros overlapping;
infinity smashed against his head.
The Whole Expressed in Its Parts
February 18th, 2010The Whole Expressed in Its Parts
I breathe in the East River’s air. It’s thick with mist and chilled in November. My body is a dam to heat; its reservoir of warmth meets the nor’easter and condensation coats my throat like beads around a glass of gin.
It rains inside my lungs. The drops first cling then slide and fall, collect within a pool of last breath’s rain. They ding the water’s surface, wringing circles expanding outward. Infinite. A model of a galaxy or a yawn radiating around a classroom.
The walls are green. A watermelon seed I inhaled last week took root against my lungs, grew leaves, spread wild like weeds. It drinks the rain and breathes the air that I bring in. It has its own cycle of respiration.
I breathe out. The puddle and lung-soil shake a little. I pause and hold the world in a vacuum as it prays for the next breath; my act of dominion I relive a dozen times a minute.
