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| eugenia macer-story |  | 1. Masonry Living stone: four square shadow Between coffee pot and kitchen cabinet Builds nothing: unattached to hard structure Suddenly chunk from nowhere Part of awhile ago or passage toward future Arriving softly bricked onto pre-fab formica Shifts away again into the shapeless fog Beneath smoothest surface of the solid “now” Flat hex six-sided in the square cut fabric Blood-crimson within the lacey frame Of this incomplete quilt’s patch Beside the goat’s face in the broken tile Must extend somewhere beyond the floor Upon which these extra tokens are found As cast off labels or receipts for the absent change. The kid is raking the leaves As he has promised While the unexpected snow keeps falling. Fragments of the past or future Assemble into the present costume Worn as a skin by the breathing city Held together brick by brick in the living silence: Reshaped patchwork after each explosion Into the approximately permanent temple’s Soft roof of fog and angled shadow. Yet I am told some still seek A special lost chunk of the original palace Suffused with the wise venom of millennia Now in the bottomless bog beyond reconstruction & surprised that they sometimes find thick stone Falling like square curds from the mundane Shadow unattached to structure Holding up the roof’s resounding shell As the blood within the ear echoes sea Pulse in the absence of shore: the living tide Builds & un-builds this temporary bridge. 2. bardic bookmark The unbelievable hazel nut Bleached a bit from precipitating Through damp, steamy stratospherics Of gravity’s desire holding planets in orbit Rests in a box of clips.: I notice Selecting a few pages to mark For some “particular purpose” attaching Words to the stormy weather briefly Scraps in the wind or a shout remembered As the sky shifts clearly into silence 3. Before & after C.P. Cavafy concert Apparitions, pieces of a puzzle, memory of faces Across a coffee shop & through public windows High on grace but low on cash \Unexpectedly meeting my lost student, unrecognized Waiting for me in the aisle of the theater Simply to turn aside without speaking my name And is this the same with visions of Apollo? Tonight I understand: when the gods appear To poets in coffee shops and bazaars These are agendas with death as a Metro stop And “luck” as a ticket to the edge of the sea Where we walked amid broken shells, razor sharp And the beached tentacles of Portuguese Men Of War Jellyfish stingers making a natural electric fence Against Hells beneath and within dry grains of sand | |
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