Kevin Grijalva
 
2 Poems
 

For All The Points


I sat on the couch
listening to you growl
thunder while appreciating
my perfectly buttered toast.
 
I am half crazy and untie
my shoes, open them up
so I can settle the indictment.
I can't talk with swords.
 
For all the points on the compass
the essential thing resists us,
with time the only direction.
I'm still trying to be the cowboy
 
in those seven-day-a-week fights.
I promise you this:
quite an interesting and heartless
life at one and the same time,
 
for I can't give you love
and rhetorical questions
without the blood.
We're both blood, you see, oozing
 
and compulsory. It's got to be
a matter-of-fact life we live
and talk here for the first time,
so no one has the jitters.
 
After the violent relaxation,
with a sun now louder than the sun,
I notice how nice the weather is,
all the ice dismantled with my pick axe.

 
 
 
A Sluggish Bird (a cento, from Ozick's "The Shawl")
 
 
What a curiosity it was to hold a pen - oozing its hieroglyphic puddles... A lock removed from the tongue... all at once this cleanliness, this capacity, this power to make a history, to tell, to explain. - Cynthia Ozick
 
A sluggish bird on ragged toes
teeters on meager bags of garbage,
laced with other people's history.
She's making holes in them with kisses,
whispering in short lines like heated
telegrams, a voice strummed so convincingly,
it's impossible to suspect
it of being a phantom's.
The streets were a furnace,
the sun an executioner,
and the other birds stood
like scarecrows, blown about
with empty rib cages.
But she contained not a grain of rot,
stood with immortal pillar legs
like the white marble of strong goddesses.
She's not a survivor,
she has the legacy of choice.
This little grimy silent goddess,
not forgetting about impermanence,
chose to retrieve while the other
birds laughed and wept in their reprieve.
More and more they were growing
significant to themselves, thinking
they were the ones strong and marble white.
To those who don't deserve the truth,
don't give it.
 
***
 
The sun fell beneath neon-radiant
low horizons. Narrow wires suspended
as shadows on the wall stirred
as the other birds,
ventured into the
night city. They, glutted with
fake fire, swooped upon her meager bags,
making in them a hundred burrowings,
Whatever was dangerous or repugnant
they made prevalent, frivolous.
Theirs was an empty search.
"How simple the night sea,
only the sand is unpredictable.
Here is lost. Lost.
Nowhere... empty," she thought
in the inferno of burning false feathers.
She flew off to the night sea
like an unlit shard of star.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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