Mercury

Mercury

Hush-a-bye

These fish that surround me like icons
on the blue battlements,
they are a risk I have never been willing to take.
Gorgeous feathers all look alike to the Jamaican girl there,
carrying a list from her auntie
into a northern climate.

don’t you cry.

One orchid
one jar of Katydids
one broken mirror
two limes
one skull
six periods
two large spiders (male and female).

Go to sleep you little baby.

As a child, I carried fillings of mercury around inside of my head.
Mother would call and call, but I could only hear the train in my ears,
moving down its tunnel of blood toward the dark heart
my father gave me in his pain.

When you wake

I’ll never get used to my orbital lenses where only the center is clear
and everything else falls away.
In the dream my girl was eating chocolates—
no, she was eating the cooked hearts of chickens
one after another.

you will see

The musak beside this escalator is playing a tune the Irish learned from whales
before the great slaughter.
Are these your lamps, O poets, fueled by blubber and blood?

After the priest had finished with her, she went into the garden behind the rectory
and filled her mouth with red clay.

All the pretty little ponies.

A Separate Life

You're not here,
not in the sky
nor ground nor water,
not even the fire.
So what do I do?
I hold the cat instead of you.
I hold this black ball of a cat,
which, at the moment, doesn't
particularly want to be held.
There's something in this cat
that reminds me of you--
not in its heat nor gaze nor touch,
soft as that might be,
but more its manner
of living a separate life
next to the one that I have
here.

You're not here
though the river is
and the tree
and the fly that drinks
across my wrist
and the stone that shapes the water
that shapes the stone.
And the ashes that relinquish their DNA
have spoken in their small, small voices
that you're not here.

The shadow is a significant other
as is the frozen breath
as is the wind
beneath the door to our bedroom
because, even as weak clues
to the spirit, they are here
and you're not.