Tagged: the Gods
Trail Maintenance
Going back to photograph
the little girl’s fall
It’s actually quite helpful
that the toilet-paper-roll
binoculars she was carrying
are still here. Picking them up
an earwig falls out, keeps falling
through tiny holes
There is only one miracle –
when what should have happened
hasn’t. The children
though they are just recently
born, seem to start each
sentence with remember
Topless Swimming Pool
For god so loved the world he traced it, and traced it
until the outside lines became dark
He wrote the hearts of young boys
into the margins of a topless swimming pool
then asked them not to look
Bubbling up from god’s wrist – a cupped hand
full of spring water, lifting weightless breasts
to the lips of these women
These women who do seem happier with their bodies
as if floating on a moon with no men. No need
for support. I’ve spoken with friends
who are women and no one is mad at us directly
More at privilege. I keep my neck still
as one of the boys in my care
has just seen his first pair of breasts go diving off the board
I tell him that women can have their tops off
anywhere men can in this city
He says that seems more fair. I envy his long life, full of
worsening. I try to shield my eyes, but they are widening
starting to get pointy in the middle
I turn my head to the line at Tube Rentals, where topless women
are being gawked at by boys like me, boys like me are offering
to hold their inflatables, saying how awful it must be
having boys like me gawk at them constantly. All the boys
are like me, with places inside they can’t reach
I watch the young ones strap on their goggles – some
have never even cut their hair. They dive to the bottom
of the springs, then come up screaming that they’ve touched it
Question
I wonder if I lie will I ever be a poet, will ever
these stories about stories become more translucent
(like christian boys in their minds when they sin) will
ever I be given new fish to swim inside me, something
to carry from place to place god as you have made me
alive out here, with not enough time to be different?
Stairtown
I have felt small
and cold
A tiny man
with blue kisses
climbing the lips
of an ice-cube tray
Always down
identical chambers
But now
in part of you
I am large
and wet with dreaming
I have taken the nights
of digging for the sun /
of digging in my arm
and started to fill them
with deep, stretching joy
that grows from the light
you say is in my singing voice
My sadness, I have spit at her
from inside you
from over this shoulder
with wine on its breath
and halfway down
a staircase
that leads into the river
This is my baptism
These are your hands
that move me
in and out
of water