Two Word Poems

Pharologist

At night, he dreams of them.
By day, he tours the coast—on roads
as thin as ribbons, long as beams of light,

a satchel full of measurements and photographs,
his notes of questions to the last few keepers.
Now he thinks he understands

that searching look that comes into their eyes,
the way their conversation shifts,
like pebbles on the ocean bed, how they

would seem to know a coming storm
from distant changes in the sea and sky.
He'd watched as they would smile

at things just out of sight, visitors in their own
thoughts: a glance into the half-distance,
an invisible alteration of the elements.

And so he's kept account, noting down
as one by one they've fallen into disuse, neglect,
decay. He'll start to tell their story, then

stop, as if he knows he'll never make you feel
his will to save, to illuminate the world,
one great sweep at a time.

 

Visitors

These days, you know more of the dead—
ones you loved now rubbing shoulders

with old friends, colleagues, that man
you used to see at the market. It's fine—

and when they come
you're just a little more prepared:

the back of a head on the train,
a familiar kind of laugh—or something

that surprises, like the way light scatters
in ribbons across a lake in the wind,

a sudden scent of crushed angelica,
or a sense of movement in the dark

outside your kitchen door. But not
at your command—a question

to be asked, a face you feel the need to see,
displaced by the slight push of others

crowding, more from year to year. They're
there, wherever "there" might be: as the space

where light from one room illuminates another
and for a moment you see more clearly than ever.