Three Poems

 

Parable and a rose tree

Draped with seaweed, the monsters of the night
lift their heads like sad waterlilies
I have lost my dreams at the bottom of the lake.

In sleepless dark I half wake all night long.
At dawn, the Blackbird's baby cries outside my window:
"I can't fly, I can't fly," he cries from the half-clothed rose-hedge
with its shredding thorns
and its winter leaves.
He's plump
and soft-bellied
and not a blackbird yet.
He goes away sad because he has great wealth.
And I have lost my dreams.

 

Your planet moon

After the feathers of June
came the idle September moon.

Your sorrow wore a black salute.
Your impulse stopped my gun.

Why did you telephone America like that,
when you knew I was afraid of losing you?

The sanitary warfare boomed from all the video stations
and people danced to it like crowds of believers.

Ten blues solos away I hear your mournful saxophone
across the winter waves, your planet moon.

 

From the City of Alice

I have eaten concrete.
It is bitter, tastes of money.

I became as tall as a skyscraper
and sent out for a parachute
because my world had failed.

And I would land beyond the cinders
and I would not crack the eggshell of the world.

I phoned the press, the TV stations, and my mother,
and told them all to watch the building's headlines.

I told them I had a parachute 59 stories high,
that I could fly.