Charred Circle
I took a walk on Tuesday in the rain —
a treat, a palate cleanser after feeding
my blank ballot into the scanning machine.
Our park was luminous with solitude.
Loving my kind, but not in quantities,
I’m a fan of weather’s role as a people-filter.
Everything seemed to be swimming in silvery nets.
The great trunks were gleaming.
Daffodil clumps beamed out like magic nests
against the monotone understory.
I spied a bird cavorting in a puddle
as if on a trampoline or a sugar high.
The shower was soft and kind. Unusual.
As usual, I relished the peekaboo effect
of pink magnolia overlapping white —
a bloom-filigree, a petal-palimpsest.
I marked how red bud maple flounces ride
on creamy blossom underskirts.
I passed the dent in the earth where a neighbor went
(not long ago) to sacrifice himself.
That compost master quit us quietly.
They’ve planted a gawky sapling
where the charred circle was,
across from a sign proclaiming ROAD MAY FLOOD.
My thoughts adhered to the blameless, blasted continent.
Untallied sites of immolations. Massacres.
Some are beside freeways.
I fingered the mangy sin of my pride in language,
annoyed at the hackneyed expression
blood on your hands.
* * * * *
Poem About My Gender and Other Topics
I.
The calendar survives on the cusp of breakage.
It has been the International Day of Women.
The cunt was summarily feted.
For me, another day of vaginal atrophy.
Using a scalloped seashell for a scoop,
I reclined in a bathtub of language,
dipping and splashing sentences
over my neck and torso,
letting the warmth run down my streaming hair.
It was a day of “not hair loss, but hair thinning.”
I sat in a bathtub of thinning,
scooping silences.
I do not come as an interpreter.
In the wild pits,
on the bled heights,
under the rubble of eternity,
they buried the alphabet.
II.
It was a day of bombed wombs, starved homes.
Of women who lie in tents
and chew the grit between their teeth,
fearing they lack the means
to keep children alive.
I got a day, we got a day
and what on earth to do with it.
Suffice to say
I didn’t like the price extracted
as I stepped over the body of a man
sprawled across my path where I exited the subway,
having first ascertained
that he was
a breathing man.
I mounted to the premature street,
its preternatural daffodils.
They jumped the gun.
They jumped the gun.
I do not come as an evangelist.
Everything looks so dingy
in the charmed light of spring.
March, 2024