Poetry from The Literary Review
Beyond the bars on the windows
one sees a boundless falling away
of palm trees broken bottles used kotex plastic and weeds
under a sky fat with the burgeoning rainy season.
Mosquitoes whiz and hurtle through the air. From the distance floats
klaxons of trucks, busses and cars cacophonious
near lunch hour as they barrel to Quinzhau,
narrowly missing walkers in straw hats, bicyclists,
pull motors lurching on the shoulders of the roads;
all things Chinese super-freighted with granite, cloth, wood, bricks
and babies.
And above us, everywhere, speakers
rust on poles like low-tech idols. Cords snake & flap. I smile,
look into every eye as I explain
the uncertainties of life in 19th-century America
how the infinite could arrive in a virus, then unfold oppressive galaxies
where the only sound permitted was the buzzing of a fly, but a sudden
bell
devours my voice
and all stand at once. Then
the speakers replace our private thoughts
with words large & tawdry as the billboards in the muddy fields.
while Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith
underscores the cog-like movements
of the light as it falls
through broken leaves crushing green
maps of Hyperborea & the ogham of leaf veins
against the glass.
One ant lifts mandibles against a rush of air
breaks salt sea-rust from the wall
of the pink inner lip, then lifts the cube
like an ensign and tractors backwards
down ledge into the familiar track
of its own scent woven outwards
by hidden glands to disappear
within a churning tumulus of monads
held within a grid of genetic directives.
There, within that order, the Queen performs
her ancient function: minting oblong tokens
of life in death--those honey-embalmed exoskeletons
that will carve their way to life
and immediately understand
the lineaments of a need larger than their own
craving for sugared moisture--
mandibles ready to clutch and carry,
lift, tug, swivel, roll out instant order
as staves direct these tiny shocks of music
along their rungs
to march in the English garden of the ear
and spread their sonic burdens on the air,
climbing within these brittle, harpsichorded spirals,
then probing silence like a shell's dry curve
until it folds itself in summer
and applause.