New and Selected Poems Read Free Page B

married,
It taught itself to fly with one wing.
When all the eggs were still golden,
The clouds in the sky tasted like sweet corn.
When the rain flooded its coop,
Its wishbone was its ark.
Ah, when the chicken had only itself to roast,
The lightning was its skewer,
The thunder its baste and salt.
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The chicken without a head made a sigh,
And then a hailstone out of that sigh,
And the window for the hailstone to strike.
Nine lives it made for itself,
And nine coats of solitude to dress them in.
It made its own shadow. Not true.
It only made a flea to bite holes in the dark.
Made it all out of nothing. Made a needle
To sew back its broken eggshell.
Made the lovers naked. Everybody else put clothes on them.
Its father made the knife, but it polished the blade,
Until it threw back its image like a funhouse mirror.
Made it all out of raglets of time.
Who’s to say it’d be happier if it didn’t?
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Hear the song of a chicken without a head
As it goes scratching in grave dirt.
A song in which two parallel lines
Meet at infinity, in which God
Makes the last of the little apples,
In which golden fleece is heard growing
On a sad girl’s pubes. The song
Of swearwords dreaming of a pure mouth.
The song of a doornail raised from the dead.
The song in half whisper because accomplices
Have been found, because the egg’s safe
In the cuckoo’s nest. The song
You wade into until your own hat floats.
A song of contagious laughter.
A lethal song.
That’s right, the song of dark premonitions.
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On a headless evening of a headless day
The chicken on fire and the words
Around it like a ring of fabulous beasts.
Each night it threw them a bite-size portion of its heart.
The words were hungry, the night held the fork.
Whatever the gallows bird made, its head unmade,
Its long-lost, axed-off head
Rose into the sky in a balloon of question marks.
Down below the great banquet went on:
The table that supplies itself with bread.
A saw that cuts a dream in half.
Wings so quick they don’t get wet in heavy rain.
The egg that mutters to the frying pan:
I swear it by the hair in my yolk,
There’s no such thing as a chicken without a head.
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The chicken without a head ran a maze,
Ran half-plucked,
A serving fork stuck in its back,
Ran, backward, into the blue of the evening.
Ran upside down,
Someone huge and red-aproned rose in its wake.
Ran leaving its squinting head far behind,
Its head with a shock of red hair.
Ran up the church steeple,
And up the lightning rod on that steeple
For the wind to ruffle its feathers.
Ran, and is still running this Good Friday,
Between raindrops,
Hellfoxes on its trail.
White
Out of poverty
To begin again
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With the taste of silence
On my tongue
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Say a word,
Then listen to it fray
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Thread by thread,
In the fading,
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The already vanishing
Evening light.
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•
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So clear, it’s obscure
The sense of existing
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In this very moment,
Cheek by jowl with
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My shadow on the wall
With its long, gallowslike,
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Contorted neck
Bloodied by the sunset,
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Watching and listening
To my own heartbeat.
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•
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This is breath, only breath.
Think it over, friend.
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A shit-house fly weighs
Twice as much.
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But when I tell the world so,
I’m less by a breath.
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The struck match flares up
And nods in agreement
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Before the dark claps it
With its heavy hands.
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•
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As strange as a shepherd
In the Arctic Circle.
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Someone like Bo-peep.
All her sheep are white
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And she can’t get any sleep
Over lost sheep,
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So she plays a flute
Which cries Bo-peep,
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Which says, poor girl,
Take care of your sheep.
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•
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On a late afternoon of snow,
In a small unlit grocery store
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Where a door has just opened
With a long, painful squeak,
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A small boy carries a piece of paper
Between his thumb and forefinger
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To the squint-eyed old woman
Bending low