Saturday, January 2, 2010

Poem 7: Untitled Sequence


There is a reunion
inside me between
my throat and an old
dried up seed.
I am full
of hunger.

I tried to grow
a garden once
but the dirt was no river
mud. Watering
amounted to nothing.
Sunshine amounted
to nothing. Love
amounted to nothing.

A year later you and I
grew pansies together
in a yogurt cup
on your typewriter’s case
near the window.

We’ve been seeing them
sprout but we are waiting
for them to bloom.

My throat,
the old seed,
the pansies
are not enough.
The four of us are
waiting for you
to come home.
The pansies are
waiting to bloom.


*
This is a handsome
mess. I’m settled in dead
or abandoned things I have
seen, in dead or abandoned
things we have seen
together. I am a collector
of old nests, lost feathers,
dead bees. My mid section
is marked by a stale waterline
so New Orleans is left in the depth
of my pockets as an unlucky coin.
My thoughts of you are set in:
two dead
deer,

Here:
I. Route 80
There were no birds of prey.
With the interior of a deer
splayed out next to it on a late
night road, the thing seems mammoth
in size. The animal was lonely there;

is there now as a dead sad thing
and its innards there breaking hearts,
later as an anonymous bloody thing,
is breaking hearts. It could have been human.

II. Route 34
An earlier death
occurred to me first as beautiful
and full. The animal was intact.
The antlers stuck out from the ditch.

The vultures were collecting, then
at once buried their bodies in its body.


I like missing you
through the loss of things,
seeing you through the wait
for our yogurt cup garden.
I am caught between an old nest
and imagining a live deer.


*
You’ve seen this before
but now it looks like I’ve spent long enough
on this coast to see its violence ending
in death like an electrical current
not ending in death.




After the second, we stopped on Route 80
In the bathroom I read (in two handwritings),
you’re the one for me /
and I love you with no reservations.

I told you, wrote it down, am saving it
for a postscript in your next note,
after reminding you about the two dead
deer we saw once in October, after reminding
you to remind me to water the pansies tonight.






------marlo barrera december 2009