Young Poets

December on the 2 Train

like twin seashells
they are twisted,
arched in, legs crossed,
bundled in creased puffers.

like quicksand,
their skin sinks in
between their eyebrows,
and lashes skate the lower lids.

slouched with turtle’s grace,
like women who have calls to take, lives to make,
but still shiver
on the train.

the daughter’s face is reflected in
steel with unusual clarity
(the twist, the puffer, the crease),
creating a third woman, and perhaps more after.

x

Grisly Work

The artiste, with a trembling hand,
Drowns pencil-shapes in paint,
Twitching at the loss of that rough-draft promise.

Once finished, she isn’t quite—
Is that orange too yellow?
Is that line too sharp?

She trims and blots and razes until
A simple sunset becomes an entirely different
Beast. Just as a chicken goes from corpse

To table-topper under the blunt gutting of a butcher
On a chopping bench. Once the head and legs are lost,
This expert refines, refines, and refines.

The once-living thing is carved elegantly and fragmented
Until it looks never-lived, unrecognizable,
Something that can be consumed safely.

And the painter returns again, and again,
Scratching, honing, bleeding red suns—
And trying not to cut out the heart in the process.

Airplane Ride

Finally see the cloud-sheath from the opposite side,
The downy white so naked, so immaculate,
Like the behind-side of a penguin’s skin.

The clean blue stretches infinitely up and
Down and sideways; remember, our souls were
Stored here before us.

Try to feel the hundreds and thousands of feet,
The celestial touch of the weightless clouds,
The definitive fear of falling,

The impossible bigness. Like
Touching your ankles or toes,
Pinching with your fingers a singular blade

Of grass by a highway, having your head
Kissed by your grandmother’s mother.
Try to grasp it, that unsticky

Enigma, that intense self-awareness. But
It isn’t possible to hold (for long) the entire
Earth in the palm of the hand.

intimations of a change in weather

March, and the evening light

tickles the throat and taunts

of summer. Telegraph wires

silhouette the sunset like a

zip-line for the soul: I can describe

it no other way and believe me,

I have tried. It is the time

of day when I could write

a poem about tarmac. I am thinking

of last summer; I am thinking

of Ada Limón, who will never

stop making everything / such

a big deal, and I am thinking

of the August evening four years

ago when I wrapped up

in a scarf and a girl in short

short shorts looked at me

strangely. I live to premeditate

the changing of the season; for ink-

blue atramentous nights over

the sea that will symbolise

what they need to. I am thinking

of morning February darkness, of

the steaming cups of tea at five

a.m. because it was the year

we all discovered time was a

construct and the days bled into one,

glissando. I am thinking of nights

knelt by water, summoning up

prose poems for the moon. I am

all of these moments, turgid

to bursting, amassed into one.

I am placing you into this life,

invisible beside me; I trace

your silver outline in the dusk.

You whisper when the

novelty falls still. We take

each other home.

xxxxx

Diptych

for Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, of the 14th century, women who would have martyred themselves again and again for the one who held them when the world was blind to love.

         I don’t think they talk about you much these days
but when they do you are always side by side:
         chambered in a cavern close together, names scratched into
memory, twin candles on the altar. Tongues tie you
         to each other in this world you walked alone, one in a hole
and one on the road, slipping your way through
         the cruellest of hands and the sharpest of tongues
with your ink and your prayer and the language
         you shared with your mother. I hope you know how I warm,
Julian, when I hear you call Jesus maternal.
         I am glad that you never shied from heresy, both of you,
hands raw to the ground scrounging for scraps
         and cocooning yourselves from the slaughter. And
seven centuries later, you feast on manna and
         now we say history was written by the victors, by the victors —
Margery, Julian, warriors wielding peace as a sword
         caressed in blood, perhaps you knew in your time how this
would come to pass. But this world chisels at
         the faith, you see, so they never quite believed you
when you wrote all manner of things shall be well
         and maybe we still don’t. I will not ask you to hold me,
your lives were built on holding other people and
         your days of the suckling screaming children are through.
But know from beyond the firmament that I
         am holding on to you, I am whispering your names,
they don’t talk about you much these days but
         I won’t let them forget. I will chamber you together
in a cavern of the mind, and I will tell and tell
         and tell them how you saved the world with love.