Poetry 365

1

Those who have already been destroyed
recognize its signs: the sky
clouds like a glaucous eye,
the wind muscles over whatever
is weak. Waves swell, engorged
with too much of something.
A lashing, a swimming of tongues
through air. Birds disappear.
The smell of ocean in the wrong place,
of something diseased, lost fish.
THe sky bellows, darkens, roars
like a drunk.

Those unacquainted with destruction
ask for wind speeds, amount of rainfall,
degree of movement. A plotting,
a computation of the destruction.

2

For some of us, all seasons are hurricane.
The winds gale up, working us like seed,
moving us like desire.

What lies beyond measurement
is all of beauty and terror.

To understand is to evacuate.

There were the parades
where I sat on a boy’s shoulders
for the first time, lifted
high and parentless above
the swaggering crowds,
where I gripped his head with
my thighs, listened for his voice
with my open legs,
waved for beads and coins
that were hurled at us like all
I knew of love then, the beads curling
over us like coupled snakes, coins
ringing escape onto the streets,
the boy breathing hard underneath me,
and the slobbering grumbles
of motorcycles, like the first grunts of sex,
the first hardness felt in the first
groping darks, and the marching bands,
the mouths of their tubas and trumpets
shining and wet with out faces in the night,
and the floats, all lit up
and moving toward you,
your first and last chance
at something.

No one tells much about it,
but there were vultures in the Garden of Eden,
Turkey vultures, to be exact.
Dark eagles, they would soar like gods
voiceless, their wings held out in blessing,
their unfeathered heads the red jewels
of the sky of the garden.

They were vegetarian then.
There were no roadside kills,
no bones to pick, no dead flesh to bloom, ripen.

And they were happy.
They could not imagine
what they would become.