|
Home
|
|
photo allposters.com
Leaves Changing
There was thunder,
every window
speaking in flashes and code
bright black, blue-white shadows
while you slept, while I held you-
I cautiously examined
a feeling I thought had drowned
or buried itself in leaf and mold
or simply expired, out of breath.
You had found me, sad, nude
under a marriage worn blanket
weary with cold hands searching
for the small heart's stilled beat.
A kiss there, and here, and there-
skilled and fond, echoes of our spring,
our wandering fall, a passage
traced back to banked coals-
winter coming on with such heat.
and then you may buy me tulips
All those beautiful
doorways, I will
get on my knees
in a windy place
in a dark blue niche
the very next storm
offer my hollows
slick, warm
humming
You can slouch
tug, trap gold
rein in the color
tangled threads
spun electric
emerge devoured
Hard rain
and grey thunder
and the winds
I hope they howl
Wry Toast to the Holy Ghost
Not all are courted gently in this life,
made noble by suffering
or leave something beautiful, polished
by strife. Some-- simply expire.
Secretly in dark corners,
they shrink and agonize
remorseful ghosts
who count the small numbers again
and again
of the few who stood graveside,
mute of eulogy.
Shall I be that ghost?
Will the pain that makes me less
follow me, haunt me,
even as I haunt the night,
a less noble spirit than I was in life?
I fear this is true. Fear there is a God
with so little to do, that even He
with his inscrutable plans,
would find time to taunt
ridicule what little I've done, will ever do
in my sheer garment
over rubbery bones and timorous shoes.
But should Death be kind,
and memory serve a forgetful tea,
an ancient elixir to empty the mind
--I might be at last content
to forage the woods as I did as a child,
find the perfect hollow under thick trees,
make it my home and haunt no more.
Sleep, if ghosts may, on the moldering floor.
I fancy I have more life left,
more than I have will to live it.
Plentiful hours before I die
to ponder which can't be forgiven.
I have not saved a man, bravely,
created a human baby
or invented a cure for any ill
--unless a spilled and sour wine
counts as narcotic to the uneasy wakeful.
This one service, a chalky pill
but better than none.
Perhaps I will be no more than wraith-
evacuator of the sleeping scream.
She who drifts past windows, amber scented
pallid voyeur of the agrisomniac,
swaying towards the sound of brutal dreams.
Voices Owned
A child's voice, held by air
the song rises, heavenly
dark in its elements, the soprano pure.
Gods, we have written into being,
in our image, in the sound of human hearts,
hide under scorched wings, weep.
In darkness, in terrible silence like mothers do.
And they in terror, in ecstatic faith placed
small hands into those of giants, beautiful
soft skinned, gentled by a small cut.
A pain dulled by light, then kindest black.
Made angels, like cut, create again
the high music of children.
A stolen song, found in the space of one spring
one brief youth, to fill the chapels-
to echo beyond that tender, tenuous age.
This knife, held in absentia by frail lovers of the page
the manuscript, the score, still wet with adulation.
© Coleen Shin 2003. All rights reserved.
|
