Misericordia
To speak respectfully of the dead is to not speak of knowing that they’re damned.
To go home again and find the front door open, the light on in the kitchen,
the pattern on the table, the old picture on the wall.
There’s a broken mirror on the floor,
a hundred different pictures
of the paradise and the fall.
Anything else is a sunken ship -
everything else is a sunken ship,
a ship we sank with rocks.
That pattern on the table,
that picture on the wall,
waiting there for the apology,
knowing no one will ever call.
Misericordia (#2)
I saw
a precious and singular boy
in a motorized wheelchair
leaning out to catch a snowflake on his tongue.
I would never trade places with him.
I understood that there was purity in his joy,
and that in my margins,
and in my money,
in my jack and coke,
and pussy too,
in victory, even,
I have none of that.
Ritual
at night
at night
two men fight
inside the circle
of light
made by a fire.
the witches,
two sisters,
chanting and swaying,
watching, not praying,
wait, just out of sight.
Southern Cross
There is,
in the last picture
she sent me, something
in the curve of her lower lip, in her half-smile,
all there ever is of loving.
There is,
in a museum,
a picture I saw as a child of
a woman in a blue dress. She holds the hem
of her skirt bunched above her knees in one hand,
stooping over to pick up seashells with the other.
She is barefoot on the wet sand left by the retreating tide,
her face hidden in the shade of her white bonnet, and I had,
for many years, wondered who she was.
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