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| Cheryl Boyce Taylor |
Convincing The Body
Study your poems
when you think you're going crazy
lay naked on the earth
cover your shame with praise poems
cover the bright bay windows
curved around a cruel day
make curtains of your poetry
cruise the sky
cruise the sky
find that slight patch of sun
stack poems, two three five
at a time on top each other
add your tears
make a bewitching violet poultice
cover those wounds child
gather acacia leaves
a dash of sea salt
two unruly beams of light
two drops of blood
from one left hand wedding finger
a fountain pen
three diamond nibs
seven wads of paper
keep by your bedside
one flask kerouac
nine sprigs lorde
three june jordan candles
two tablets clifton
ten wads neruda
three large jars perdomo juice
five reams bonair-agard
one skillet two teacups
two steel pans
mountainous garlands of
ai ai ai
your reflection
study your reflection
use as mirror rain water
keep calabash full
trace your mouth
lips deformed and bleeding
praise that mouth and swear
swear to love yourself
study your reflection
watch your eyes
look for crossing buffalo
clear a path ten quick breaths
your heart
strike your heart
strike it child
let it break break
strike it
beat spontaneous poems
from wrist hips
lips fingertips
heart beat violent
irreverent basin blue poems
beat poems from legs
chest eyes breast
now read read
damn! like a poet
by Cheryl Boyce Taylor, from her collection, Convincing The Body, 2005, Vintage Entity Press
find Cheryl's collection online at: http://www.vepress.com
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| Lynn Domina |
First Morning in Heaven
Clover lifts slightly, stills, the breeze a brief
silent whiff. You never knew you’d longed
so for silence. Chipmunks here
scatter quietly; field mice
nibble softened seeds. You remember reading
how giraffes only seem mute to human ears;
one female suddenly nuzzles
the top of your head, tongues
a single strawberry from your plate. You’d waited months,
swimming in Squam Lake, to hear a loon cry
until one did cry off to the north, unmistakable as people said.
Your delight fills you again; one cries here, too,
beyond sight. You recall
leafy sea dragons, the most astonishingly bizarre creatures
you ever beheld, as twigs nudge lily pads across the pond,
tousled leaves dipping beneath ripples. They survive
in the New England Aquarium
and along Australia’s southern coast,
another place you still plan to visit, if only to listen
for a kookaburra’s raucous laughter,
pocket a dropped tail feather, like this one,
left by the plump male who springs from your porch swing now.
Once you saw a blue heron lift itself from shallows;
once you saw a bobcat
amble across your road. Impossible, visions
out of time. Yet you saw
once and see again.
From Framed in Silence by Lynn Domina
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