myth

Bulrush basket and my hands ached with the weaving.
It did not matter to me what you become.
A great king and a teller of lies?
A name written into abstraction with the telling of it all?
God’s favor is a flippant thing
and I have been a luckless woman,
but it seems I, alone, saw
the vanity of your pestilences and
the carving out an order for our people.

I too walked eyes bright with unpromised sand,
but still I saw you, lecher, gazing at our daughters.
All your sins quickly forgiven by a sea of
divided women lusting after vanishing greatness.
The swarming injustice put down
when no blood above the door
protects the sleeping faithful.

Myth-makers have had their way with me and
the telling of my own compassion,
but I, alone, know
that your drowning meant nothing to me.
I fought out against the sucking mud that day,
the river heavy with heat and undercurrents
of serpents, and looked only forward.

gasp

you are my bottomless basket,
the moment my pocket’s unthreaded and
the purse strap is broken and the crowd’s all
upon my new reading glasses.

you are the baby that belonged in his carriage.

I only stare at the bricks all
rushing upwards.

R

Ash

We’ve been told and we believe
that ash covers the earth like a second skin.
The bomb has finally hit or
a second pompeii, perhaps, forcing us, you and I,
to take cover under three thick stories
of entombment. We wait for a sign, day by day,
until to stay, we fear, means
these cremains pressing into our nostrils
into our ears, deafening us to death.

So I, careful, cut away a dry square of wall
with you, love, right behind me and I promising
oh god let us have our life together
let us climb through the black soot up
into a life that I won’t squander again.

And you say
hold your breath, we will go
together—choking—
I move away my patch of wall and force these hands
up through the roof, through filthy sheets of plastic
and into our uncertain escape.

Yet I find the earth not changed. There is no ash.
A year’s imprisonment with blacked-out windows
spent in anxious planning and
begging god’s pardon for nothing.

Now we have our life together—nothing stops it.
But I don’t believe in god.
I, sideways, glance at you and say
you got three dollars, dear?
I’m out of cigarettes.