January 2012



Stolen
Promises Crackling
lemon ice
Face to the Highway
One more thing...

ribbons
These Afternoons
Fragments of Joy
Crescendo on the Sky
Rising to Meet the Light

Stolen

Light poured,
down the throat of the Haifa channel,
like coke splashing from a J&L furnace,
it’s gullet screaming fire, raw with scarlet.

My brother’s blood is on my orders,
on my weapon,
in my eyes,
on my hands.

Light gleamed dully from his tags
as I tore them away from his meat strewn shell.
I don’t rise until after the sun has fully set.
I quit my job at J&L.

Promises Crackling

I can feel the creases,
the folds where my cells won’t meet,
where the tracks run out to the sand
with sweat
with tear
with the broken rivers of dream.

I can see the hollows,
the pockets filled with shadow,
where the light just can’t get in
to heal,
to sear,
to mend the rip in my heart.

I can hear the promises,
cracking in the darkness,
like branches in the winter
too lonely
too cold
to afraid to wait for me.

lemon ice

ice pins the willows
and a brash young oak
like specimens caught
in the blow of a frozen sneeze
their limbs in supplication
as if locked in penance
perhaps for insulting a breeze.

Face to the Highway

I emerge upon the rise
lit in apricot and blued root yams
like a miner walking
the coke and slag of us
sloughed aside from these hilltops,
singeing the slope of the road
awaiting the final shits of steel.

I raise my face to the highway
roadkill, street chum
your soft shoulders grinning
your cold dis-regard
a bracelet of fog around my ankles,
a tenderizer dissolving my grace.
I raise my face to the highway - defiant.

Inspired by a song title of the same name by Tom Waits.

One more thing...

Just one more thing…
before I go,
before I leave you to it,
before I pass from your heart.

Your life was once mine,
My life was once yours.

Just one more thing…
before I leave the light of your mind.
before you fill it
with the gaze of another’s eyes.

My love was once yours,
Your love was once mine.

Just one more thing…
before these years turn to fleeting seconds,
before our smiles turn to glisten
in someone else’s dream.

Our love was once yours,
Our love was once mine.

ribbons

I’d hold you neath a slipper moon
our senses poised
each pore on alert
every ribbon undone

I’d leave you to rev your engines
adjust your rudder and flaps
every line primed
for combustion.

I’d leave for the road
crossing creeks and channels
I’d arrive outside your window
every ribbon nearly undone.

image © Ara Gureghian, 2010

These Afternoons

These afternoons,
this nine or so days,
when the furnace roars
and the grasslands look like hair
wafting on the cheeks of the sun.

These afternoons,
when the wheat is in conference
colliding with the light in the air
and the porch glows auric
with the close of these autumn days.

These afternoons,
when the prairie is blind
to the fists drawing back,
to the clenching of the soil,
to the winds that will bring it to its knees.

These afternoons,
when the light is majestic,
when a camera just seizes in optic tears.
The land rises in grandeur
as an artist at the prime of their years.