The GARDENER and HIS WIFE

bright blood
beaded
like turnips
at the corner of your mouth—
I have not
enjoyed
the bitter turnip
since I was young.
I find that rage
has made them sweet.

The window
is a yellow splinter
and smells of blood
fogging with the slow descent of dust—
your black eye
swivels outward—
there are
shadows
in the lee of the sill.

your black eye
is an avocado, blind
and thick. It was not me,
lover, who
has bitten of you so
savagely.
It must have been
another man.

At last, another poem. It is likely I would have perished had I gone for another week without writing something. Only a first draft, but what is anything when it is born?



RUNNERS IN THE DARK

nothing remains:
suggestion
of a thin coppery miff
shuddering mothlike

and then?

the closer I
look
the more I
do not find.
where the jolt
of grit and flesh,
and the sweat in the silence?
there was none.
there was
None.

scoop the air
for the glittering dust,
there is only
this imagining of
immaculate chaff.

Events tumble out of my hands like a clumsy shuffle.

What is going wrong?