"Am I still a man/ from those fields?"
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
The Saint of Missing Limbs
The saint of missing limbs
wags her finger
and leads me to polish
her den on tiptoes
the thigh's gleaming star.
And I knew monks
as blankets thrown over men
and straggling gray fields
indented and apart.
Am I still a man
from those fields? You are
and always have been
a puddle filling with trees.
_______________________________________________________________ To Attraction
The crows' nest has finally flown from the ship
and the ship from its conscription
to list, in age, against our heartbeats
for greenness and homeland.
And we a little bruised and blackened
hover down in future tenses toward
a new triangular age where boots
flow like lava wearying the concourse
and the fountain always beginning
has begun at last beneath balconies
where still we sip some night-feeling
from a bombshell.
In the country,
pyramids constellate as faded porchlight,
where mountains should be the river
should be the rocks should be is no answer.
Only tenderness reveals
the accidental scenery
and holds all consolation
to a shrug, when we lie
in each other's particles,
when we stand electric and absorbed.
_______________________________________________________________