Poetry

10.

Dad, you look like a doll
I wouldn’t want to play with, boxed
in your casket. The mortician
tried to paint you pretty.
I wanted to be pretty, too, but mom says
makeup is inappropriate for funerals.

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In the house there were always two 

white deep freezers packed pretty 

decent with red meat. Deer season, 

You can go down for a jouk, I want to say, a gander 
at the greylags on the green
that’s not so much a field as a grassy space 
where the flats once stood.

a line between the wild and settled regions /
the colored band around heraldic shields
the seam / rim / edge / periphery / the margin brink or limit /

I was daubing s onto our front step with the blood and guts of clover mites
when Speccy Rab headbutted BA—which didn’t end well for Rab’s glasses.

Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorse
would turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so much

If time is money then how much might the bookie’s runner’s leather shoes have cost? To start: Tommy takes a watering can and tends the window boxes on his window sill.

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.