Ezekiel shaves his head
and eats the word of God.
Tongue tasting honey sweet,
he speaks and prophesy
breathes dry bones
back into life—a valley
swept full of flesh bursting forth,
tulips spreading out and up,
reaching for the promised land. What
a way to ruin a poor man’s supper.
For penguins,
they say love
is in the rocks.
This, I can understand,
as if it were true
to us both–
pressure cupped
in your palm
and then in mine:
like worry stones,
set against another,
building walls.
–
rb
My aunt studies genealogy, marking gravestones
found across 3000 miles of open water.
There, she collects numbers to tell her
the silence in a child’s early death,
how a lover dies within days of the other.
On cold stone, these numbers become names
that repeat and merge, expanding out,
like ice cracking with the first rupture of spring;
yet even these slivers are lost, turned to water,
the branch ending in some childless past.
On a smaller scale we study ourselves–
like lines on palms scarred with something
more than now: we learn to laugh alike,
using our hands to trace broad arcs
in the air, gesturing toward each other.
But even more, my mother sees in me her mother,
the structure of bone, the color of my eyes:
and so, to see more clearly this shape
that belongs to no one, I sit with old photos
and see you seventy years ago,
laughing straight into the lens’s eye;
I wonder if the coldness I feel now also wraps you
where you lay, tucked underground, waiting.
-
rb
April and ten, rain becomes mud
and early watermelon cracked open,
cigarette crayons pulled from slim lines of color,
marking white eggs to dip,
drowning craft in water…
-
rb
You think getting up early
a chore, this humdrum routine
of shower, coffee and out the door….
until today—
today
you are given a gift:
across the way,
housed in
thin glass and faux brick paneling,
a man
in his forty-year-old skivvies
jives
to some randy up beat twenty something
thump thump growl
they call music.
Shaking loose
that dead skin-eye midnight look,
he struts,
cocked
hip and leg jutting
drag queen smooth,
owning that pale skin
sun, dawn
greeting morning.
-
rb
Last night I had you
on
till late—
programmed to repeat–
until body heavy
and sore
I pushed your button off;
silent,
you perched inside
my player,
sleeping
while,
sleepless, I echoed
with melody.
-
rb
