A Dream, At Dawn, When Dew

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Oh.


I'm supposed to find a poem
strung from Lvov to Djemaa el Fna,
from a spirit bear and pubescent angst
to plague and broken marriage

who

like the time I found my cat
leaping for dragonflies
in a poem about laundry,
the laundry-list of stolen verbs
become metaphor
when applied to Pip

do you think

or when I wrote a poem
about "f" and "l"
that became the farmer Albert,
gone fallow.

or the love poem to a ceiling fan
and the butter-stripes of sunlight
on the bedspread.

you are


(RUBBISH)


skitters across the square,
a ballroom contest with the dust
as warriors settle
into the soil again
at dawn

and the boys in white go home,
drum skins flaccid on their frames,
the dance ends, the snakes coil
in their baskets

the waterman,
weathered to leather,
stinks up the alley way
into the souk


no one would want


but that was years ago

here on a cliff over the Pacific
I roam naked to the sun
and the white bear,
my totem
and my torturer


to read this

I pack my mask with pungent herbs
that he might not attack me



There is no poem in these things - detail
at the front door
refusing to be beaten away -
only voices
the bad ones
who whisper

"fraud"




The day after my eighth birthday, my father
told me I couldn't go on the roof any more.

"pretender"

Little girls cry saltdew
on my dream.



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