This Foolish Bird
My pen must drink some ink this foolish bird
I tell you there was totally no comfort
It was the terrible engine which drove me
To have the unfair comfort of ton corps
To ask of you unfairly to solve this
Puzzling pain
The memory of animals I've envied it
Last night you showed me the sex of angels
Humans have cell walls, are limited by the reach of muscles
Cage of bones
And I say as you kneel, hands in mine, how impossible it is
To come so long in response to even your breath.
Amtrak: Post-Disaster Puzzlement: Dread Not
He moves snaky-hipped
through the corridor where the cars couple
humping, jouncing as we splay hands against
the corridor.
He says, "I can't wait to take off this hair."
It's his hair? I...
And the kindly one now toothless
lives in High Falls, not the
High Falls that cataracts through Rochester
refracts the Genessee into such a stunning picture
beside the dun sedimentary escarpments, fleeing.
His baldness is different.
His eyes startlingly blue and his belly
and his toenails, fingernails like arrows
to keep one at bay.
And he says sometimes, sometimes
if he's sick he takes medicine for his nose
in his bag to work, but we are all in a hurry
a hurry, and dumbly we run.
Running to, running from
conjoin where the trains switch, shunt.
Susan Maurer's latest collection Raptor Rhapsody
was released by Poets Wear Prada in 2007. Her literary past
includes By the Blue Light of the Morning Glory, Linear Art.
Clamshell Press did a letterpress broadside (Three Poems by
Susan Maurer) as has the The Center for Book Arts (Longing). She
has been in over a hundred different journals and anthologies
(in ten countries) including Literary Imagination, Cross
Connect, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orbis, The Unbearables' Help
Yourself!, Autonomedia, and Soft Skull's Off the Cuffs. She has
been nominated for a
Pushcart by four editors and has read at various venues
including Barnes & Noble Booksellers, New York Public Library
and Harvard Co-op. |
