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.
Mama, did you deaden that deer? Distraction did, dear—
he crashed through the wall and just sleeps there. Till real suns rise
and shine him up come spring.