ELEGY FOR THE UNSAID

after Neruda

In this mouth I gather darkness, an aria,
rosewater tongue, tympanic bone,
a poem more quiet than quietness,
a bronze song, something undone, salvia,
a crushed butterfly.
It is the blood on a light bulb, the seventh sadness,
a fluctuation that closes oceans and eyes.
The vermilion and solitary luminary
shimmies and singes the feathers of the aviary.

Moon, the clock's word, dear mother, ruin, rain.

__

FREEZE FRAME, WITH FORSYTHIA

You will bind me
in an aquarelle, my skin
blue as Canterbury bells. Call me
mademoiselle before you execute, like the hand-
tinted photo of the dancer, Margarete Gertrud Zelle, arms
scissoring the air, fending bullets and flowers as she pirouettes.

You will find me
in the zero hour sipping
a whiskey sour with a cherry, my hair
yellow, not sallow or frizzed like Bishop's flower.
In a bell-shaped dress trimmed in snow-white florets, I smell
of fever, soil as I pose in the doorcase. You refer to me as daughter

of gnawed bones.
I am property of ________.
A profile in the slanted rain. I am
versatile. You call me Lily of the Nile, fingering
umbels as you scour the floor in search of my shadow. Hours
sift and flow and form a canted frame where you lean on one elbow

statuesque as a window
sash. You've captured me,
you say, mid-bloom, in your eye
frame, in the process of photograph and pose
and polyphonic prose, the kitchen lit by my ante-
bellum skirt, the yellow spikes of forsythia going up in flame.

____

These are excerpted from the chapbook, Notebook. Knife. Mentholatum., recently published by New Michigan Press, and available [here].