Two Word Poems

A Welsh Funeral, Betwys-y-Coed

After David Cox, circa 1847

A methodology towards a painted end:
lives in a landscape form a landscape,
impartial and of no distinctive self. No
tale, no legend, no bad reputation.
No hair, no flesh, no silk.
From cloth, to leaves, to stone;
from dissolution to the vanishing point,
as all these footsteps go.

 

Last Confession

You can ask me anything.
I promise that my answers

will be fair, impartial,
unencumbered with the truth.

There's nothing big at stake,
except maybe my reputation,

and that was my invention
anyway. I started all those stories,

and last I looked, there's not
a single word that might be true.

My best man told them
at my wedding; he can tell them

at my funeral—just too late, because
I'll hear the gates of heaven closing

at my back, before the devil hears
my footsteps running up the golden stairs.