First Some Amazing Tricks and Slights of Hand

 

The girl in the iris stills. Flash. Bone. Exposed tulip,

your eyes twinkle and well like visible

pitch but feathery and cheapside. It’s there

for the taking

and finally you wish to see how spatially wizened

the perfect view a brief but tiny contretemps or,

contre-risposte, the girl in frame

number three is still

tied to the train terrifyingly moon-struck and irised,

watch the bubble. What Rousseau calls false air

and fairyism, you call spicy human pleasures

something faisandé

née twinkly, no? Ha-ha. I said ha-ha, cheaply. Ah-ha,

girl! Everyone sees bright and luminous lights

in the paper. It’s a sad day for canary,

like-it-or-not

the universe living out its end capaciously perfect,

seas thrashing in their humdrum reservoir

tip: seen just this way an angel switches

lens and look!

Mary Oliver’s House of Light (1990)

 

You could not believe in a kind

of failure. Inside your sleeve the sonnet’s dark

unfold, the wide harbor. You are thirsty.

Gazing and sleeping, in your language the finger is small

and quick. Like the aimless god’s instant seize

you remind the devout

of home. The body’s fabric, Rilke’s small

poem of silent. You have said no

and nothing has broken.

Only a few moments ago an instant

of herons is the forge of loneliness which is anything

or nothing.

When god burrowed her soft breath, you were

holy. In your anarchy

children are small lyrics

of blossom full of water.

Tell me, where is your theatre, your wonderful bird, your small

lily as it breaks among angels

or windows?

You can be lovely and lonely,

or lonely and

lovely.

Your loving words, like water

they are clarity, the human

egg, shimmering.

 

 

                                                                        for Julie