Open Casket

They're cutting your chest
open as I write this,
the surgeon's knife drawing lines
as practiced and precise as the strokes
of my pen on paper.

I wonder how they crack the ribs
of a body so sturdy?

Now they're opening the encasement
of the most sacred chamber, never
meant to survive such violation.

Will they read the names of your daughters
scribed on walls of muscle, so much wetter
than they look on charts and diagrams?

Will they hear secrets
gathered during a lifetime
whisper through aorta and mitral,
startled by the advent of light and air?

They'll bind you back together
with their meaty hooks,
more like a butcher sewing a rolled roast
than a mother's careful stichery.

But will your generous heart
forgive such insult?

Perhaps it will wither away in sadness
at being incarcerated again
now that it has basked
in the forbidden joy of light.

Second Son

He looks like a grown up.
Tops me by ten or more inches now,
with a Calvin Klein undie-boy body
and a razor line of repartee.

He's signed on for the army in May,
already a veteran of his first O.E.

I know he'll survive without me there
to bandage his scrapes
and sing him to sleep.

But when he climbs out of my car
at his father's house
I see the blonde curls
of my two-year-old son,
clutching Brown Teddy
as he toddles inside.

Eden

Oh garden of horror -
symptom of a diseased mind -

home of the celestial worm.
Move - move -
mollusc of bark,
engine of leaves,
motor grind of root and seed.

Disjunctive blight -
stretch in phosphorescence
all around the fruit
of loins - of judgement.

Oh Eden, fertile child,
lost now, your paradise.
Burned till even thorns can't grow.

Surgery

I remember how your touch
lights my body with sunshine,
the cloudless blue
that glows in your gaze.

You have a heart
weathered like a rock
worn by river currents
then warmed by summer heat.

I wonder if the surgeon's knife
will trace scars in the tempered surface
and open wounds that tether you to me.

I worry that the rock will turn to dust
in the chill of the anaesthetist's dream.

The Case

It slips from me without my knowing.
The beauty of a word in its small black case.
The edge of a thought, defined in crisp lines
that belie the deep, dusky petals beneath.

Babylon

Tower to heaven,
planned to wreak revenge on God,
but he is not afraid
who wrought
the very breath of men.

A shift of finger stirred words
and now they spin
in conglomoration
incomprehension.

Babylon, how clear you were
in thought
how easily confused
in the translation to word
in the execution of deed.

Now your spans of cedar
and rifts of stone
are swallowed by sand
though you remain
in thought, a monument
of intention.

Scarlet woman ride the beast
with your cup of words.
Drink fluently
interlocution
a harlot of clarity.

The Parrot

In its eye the white freedom of heaven,

violet horizon a line in opposition

to the black bars of a cage.


The head able to hold just one thought,

memory of the lightness of feathers

adrift on a breath of wind.