Dale McLain    three poems

Archaeology
 

I squat amid the ruins of a burnt house
and finger the charred earth,
hoping to uncover some flowered shard,
a teacup handle, a rusty hinge-
wanting nothing new or bright or brilliant,
only the commonest thing.

My knees are soiled and the light
weakens toward the western rise.
Shadows embellish the ground
and I sift until you call me.
Your voice lifts me
to my feet and across the brambled hill
where we once saw a fox,
brindled flanks disappearing
into cedars and shade.
We were too astonished to speak,
the moment folded in a pocket,
a love letter to carry into battle.

When I reach the ridge
there is a yielding wind
and a sloping darkness
that rises to take me
with the tenderness of sleep.
When I see you at last,
a smudge of violet
against a closed curtain of sky,
you fill my hands with relics.

natural disaster

I could not hear you
though I laid my head on the ground,
my ear to the frozen earth. I heard
the magma churn and the tip-tip
of the sparrow’s feet.
But from you-
nothing,
beyond the silence of falling ash.

I saw you beside the chasm
after the earthquake,
your pretty mouth moving,
the sky a red banner behind you.
All I heard was the lava boil
and the sound of the seabed shifting.

I have been listening
all these long days and fearsome nights,
my head cocked, my hands still.
I have ignored every disaster,
overlooked raging seas and shifting plates.
But you spoke into the wind,
in myths and lies so dangerous
even the earth wept.

On reading poetry

Master of pot lids-
clatter, sing, and snivel.
You think yourself bigger somehow
when you stand on sheets of paper,
arms sticking out of the windows
of a very small house.
You prissy poet, with one trick
reincarnated ad nauseum,
I would know your smear
in a bucket of snot.

I have eaten your words
after you, the regurgitated
strophe, a bowl of lukewarm mush,
staccato verses caught in my throat.
The tapeworm of your prosy proclivity
burrows in my belly.

I return to it though,
out of some curious loyalty,
Run my hands over almost sonnets
mortified by the thrill
the symmetry stirs.
One acquires a taste for it.
 

©Dale McLain 2006
 

---

top