Sunday, June 8, 2008

Poem: Unanticipated Natural Array

 
Buried amphora
Hairline cracks
Black and shiny in patches
Dulled in others
Dirt gently brushed away
Diagrams revealing
The rage of Achilles
Drunk in love on the beach
Stomping away
To sit
To brood
He’s the hero aggrieved
Let the motherfuckers die
I don’t give a shit
He hisses
Sitting in his tent
Staring at the sand
Digging with his heel
His bloody selfish useless jealous murderous hideous rage
Is all we need remember
Picking at it
Scraping through it
Burnishing
Polishing
Take your vase and clean it
Put it on a stand of wood
Simple
Centered
Black lacquer
Lacy coppery embellishments
Remember the wall
Of pitted tiles
Enamels wearing thin
Showing through their colors
Your empty heroic vase hollowed with
Ancient air breathed in a tomb
Now pick some flowers
A wild bursting bunch of untamed color
Leafy stalked and bent
Gather them
With an eye toward an arrangement
Shifting them and tugging them
Into a shape that pleases
Cut off the stems
Thrust them into the vase
So they spread out
In an unanticipated natural array
And turn the vase
Slightly
Then look at your colors
And your history
And think of this
Thuggish brawling clansman
And how he would
Have driven his foot
Through your vase
Exploding flowers
Against the wall
To drop
And whither on the sand
And would have kicked
Shards of clay aside
Like corpses
Into a ditch



cimail (June 7, 2008)

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