Three Poems
The Sun Stands Still Who what where when why in the dark dark dark dark dark broken-boiler night would I suddenly start up thinking of you, happiness? Equestrian frost-shapes send your empty-handed mute messengers riding straight at the glass. Snow replaces obvious fake snow, spray-on snow, Styrofoam. Lacy soft unlatched fish scales and cabbage-white wings nostalgically settle on gargoyles outside. Three dimensions, including happiness, glitter under ice. Loneliest Parakeet One less tenant, white onion-dome cage, one caught soul flown. Rained on funeral rituals (humming, nettles brushing shoulders) give gravediggers crud to shovel. Residual breast-feathers drift through room with faint shit-like odor of cigar smoke. So the widower experiences parthenogenesis: Blue-green faces/faces/faces in facing mirrors-with-bells: motionless, mute colony. I replace what the Thief steals every several seasons, flickers, bubbles, dew. Children christen newest body-double “Cherry Blossom.” Cherry Blossom stiffens near bride/groom. Uncostumed, everyone adheres to his/her twig, biding time, wondering— edible, loveable, lethal? Autumn leaves, these fly-by-night loves. Haunted House Knock-knock— who’s there?— You Know Who— You Know Who wh—! No more fire-opal October light. Coq-a-l’anes twist-tied to neglected dollar store cobwebs—slow-decomposing leaf hammocks, cradles of plastic skulls long ago glow-in-the-dark, graves of fairy lights, paper hearts, sparklers, solstice-markers now unglittery, lately unelectric— one misfit roof tile acting alone might tear all decorations down and toneless skeleton-tree operettas hound again. Even in struck dumb snout and dusty ears cocked spider handiwork. Tell me again, how came we to live with candelabra antlers, glass eyed mortuary beauty spellbinding our hallway? We never understood clocks, so hung a head where the clock belonged. …