Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

Why should that surprise any of us? Doubt
nearly ever hovers about the smell of clover
where grass stains the nées and the infancy
of a pair of stainless eyes peer from beside
the either sides of our slant slash mentality.

Perhaps, perchance, perskips per minute advancing
bees prance up to their gated cities dripping with honey.
There is this theory that testosterone ruined the world
and in the end the little birds all stung themselves to death,
hung their heads over the sides of old tired fountains
and eyed the dried-eyed mechanical phizzles for awhile
while rumor spread among the large-loined choplets,
drooped in the afternoon sun, they were better off on the hoof
as festival reared one more time its approximate gaily skirted
flattery. Then dropped like a large pair of pantaloons
aflutter in broad silk and damask rose settling over a dry pond
where the ghosts of geese long gone solemnly paraded around
its cracked trackless bed, their beaks stuck in the empty pockets,
banks lined with mimes silently applauding imitations of water.

Perhaps they are only practicing? The minister said to the one-eyed king
recounting in detail the furious sword-made gains - the blade-shied
population shorted by a head and the other half wheeling about
the sound of anything resembling the tinnish rattle of uncertainty.

Study, if you will, belief spreading its oily film over the sleek backs
of solitary harbor seals playing beneath a canopy of gulls. Clowns.
What do they know of friendliness? Fishing and excursion ferries
with their wax-paper bobs of hookless descent spiraling into murkish
rust of foot-thick plaque on the mottled spines of spindly graves;
sunken ships that mother the distant rumblings of dairy vans
pointed toward the end of a long pier conversant with deep-fat
and the dump of the morning's catch-of-the-day into the shimmer
of low-octane exhaust. Pores clogged with deck tar, they emerge -
flop the beach like a heard of sand-spotted brown balloons,
eyes pleading inland, mating calls barked to the shapes of dark hills
unheard the wheeling birds, scoop waves curling under
a sky collapsed into a heap of folded tent - its side-show exposed.

It's a question of 12-paned window, empty of eye, drawn into gesture
by the yellowing unanswerable leaves, falling paint chips in sunlight
dragged over atonal draughts of blown dunes, siren melodies struck
upon memorial glass &paper shed from a desk piled with mounds of salt
and log-stained calendars of passing cargoes melted beyond recognition:
concavities filed among the lost-wax castings of in-dwelling masks,
suspenders stretched across the broad back of a rumpled shirt, a Z-number
slumped in a captain's chair covered with moss, iris fringed, ever-fixed
on distillates of honey, backward glanced through a sun-stained lens
calling green the maiden names of bottled shipwrecks.

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

©Red Slider, 1999, 2006 all rights reserved.

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