"Children claustrophobic in their skinsfanning out like fish bones."
More Perihelion:
BobSward's Writer's Friendship Series
Aquick list to poets featured in this issue:
Learning Not To Kill Them
The dead complain we lack They're offered refuge In the slow caress of years, 2 Since I have learned not to kill them If they come by day I recall simple equations in the heart's circumference, Friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn and under the ashen stars
the skill to keep them buried.
But that's the grave's job
and there's no safe burial ground.
They'll shine up through the earth
spreading their affection.
under markers and memorials
but they refuse and wait
for us in unlit places,
tapping their white canes
with the terrible patience
of those possessing time.
our weight is doubled by
the burden of others
we cultivate and carry,
and deep in the future
children keep us alive.
things have been easier
though I prefer my ghosts
to inhabit the dark.
I'll leave all the doors open.
I watch them mouthing secrets,
smiling as if there were two heavens.
each sum exquisitely fixed in my memory.
Women in sweet and sudden rages
for fear the future comes when they're not looking.
Children claustrophobic in their skins
fanning out like fish bones.
Younglings piercing love's delicate membrane
to taste the fleshy core.
and the ritual smile.
Together with them the seeded hours pass
until a spill of sun, a sweep of shade
my dead are growing old.
_______________________________________________________________ Sleeping With the Invisible She dreads the thought leaving She fears the wind Held fast in amber of memory But in her secret world She hears once more Night spans out in a slow glide Look long and longer _______________________________________________________________
empty-handed as her life leaks out
and words beat against each other
into alphabets of silence.
with its invisible rope and scaffold,
the sea with a thousand eyes
and rain like a dance of knives.
are breathy remainders of those
with a past of ashes
and ash their only future.
she sleeps with the invisible
in the long and late afterward,
safe in the warm and yeasty dark.
summer harps, choirs of insects,
cinch pods mating
and dandelions snuffing the air.
as a voice deep in her heart's hollow
whispers,
before the drum rolls of morning
herald the naked earth
no bud time no seed time
and the sun like a dead heart
unfaithful
at last.