reprised.

{somebody lost their wings. left them under a tree in arts quad, or crashed there, icarus-like.}

I poked these two poems a little more. I am done (for now) with the first one -- it's not great but that's all it can be right now. The second one I think I am liking a bit better, but I'm still not entirely satisfied. (If I put it up here, I might be able to find a new angle from which to poke.)

prometheus or icarus?

i)

when my mother was young she feared nothing more than the flash of the bomb the rehearsed rush to duck & cover facedown & curled up

on classroom carpet, fetal turtle waiting for the shadows to pass, for ash to rain down like chalkdust, tasting the sicksweet bile of separation in her thoughts:

mother / daughter, flesh / skeleton, that’s what her brothers told her, they said it would be like being engulfed by the sun –

all the families on her street with their little concrete beehives built in their backyards, filled with their tin-can & water-barrel honeycombs, that’s where she’d run

if the siren sounded, where they’d all hide from the fire falling, & the long winter, ashen
& cursing a terrible creation, the theft of that blasted fire –

ii )

just this month white-coats slowly slipped the hands of the doomsday clock two dashes closer, now it’s sitting at five to midnight but i’m not scared of that –

i heard that up in iqaluit they’ve realized they’ve not yet got a word for the bird
with a breast ruddy as seal blood, they’ve never seen one before –

those robins gone north to warmth, & orange trees perish in frosty california.
a woman in the maldives watches her pearls, sands swiftly dissolving, her neighbours falling into the sudden swell of the sea –

& she isn't so worried about nuclear fission / fusion, no,
she knows we’re already melting our wings of thread & beeswax, all those people

with their wheels & their oil bring us

just seconds & seconds closer to the sun –

* * *

[no name yet]

when my father meditates
his spine gleams straight just like a winter birch
with each white knot of vertebrae
fecund & flowing with the ghosts of a sweet sap,
amber plasma / a healthy blood –

(the ash of last year’s platelets, clotted, hang
from broken branches, stems of the useless transplants)

yet down in the valley ice blossoms on water;
he sees the new white cells forming clean in the cold, lulling veins of the stream,
lymphocytes crunching, collecting on the bank –

somewhere in all this he finds
all these little benedictions, they rustle like
the peeling paper-bark, his breath rushing
in exhale / inhale –

(that sweet psychasthenia lets him forget his bones,
their bitter greenish marrow, empty homes)

just forget the body, only remember breath –

when my father meditates
he brings the whole world rushing
into his throat, lungs flashing their alveoli
of white weeping birches splayed across the sky
to embrace / to heal / to rest