Howie Good:
Four Poems
BORDER WAR
1
A tangle of woods,
like a sentence
with too many and’s.
2
You convert your birth
month to music,
French and Italian
by turns, but so soft
that the guards
at the checkpoint,
slim, sensitive,
morbidly conscientious,
manage to hear it
as something else,
the far-off weeping
of a crowded freight train
crossing night’s long,
irregular border with hell.
3
The artist’s mistress,
shot behind the ear
and devoured
by sirens and dogs,
her name spelled
just like the flower’s.
WRITING LIFE
Leaves fly
like red kites.
A boy kicks
an apple
across
the street.
I can hear
his voice,
but not
his words.
The wind
thrusts
its beak
into me.
THE BUTTERFLY GARDEN OF ABSINTHE
The first time
I heard April becoming April,
I heard jewels in the mail,
futuristic apparatus, weird haunted frogs,
Bang, bang,
I heard Little Red Riding Hood say,
and above the accidental crimes of birth,
I heard schlock deities moving
to untidy local motels,
telling most roses and wild apples
dot dot dash
ETERNAL RECURRENCE OF THE SAME
1
One week it’s an uncle in Jerusalem who shatters. The next week it’s my father who calls. What can cause more harm if misused, love or hate? The question confuses me. Some nights I need to take a pill to fall asleep. A motel sign advertises cable TV and no vacancies. I go to bed still bleeding a little, like a man from a country where no one else lives.
2
He wouldn’t take off his hat. To live well, he said, you must live unseen. He had a rope around his neck and one leg over the railing. A passerby happened to notice the bank clock said 11:11. The most mysterious thing is a fact clearly stated. I inquired at the desk. The sun will shine for another six billion years. At least.
3
I stood there with an umbrella under my arm, a mournful observer. Others ran. It was what machines dream about, but covered in flames and the maps of missing countries.
4
During dinner, the trees dropped leaves in the pond. She said something about guilt and forgiveness. The orange cat that had adopted us was licking itself under the table. I nodded as if I understood. Night frost lit up the fields, a language that has no word for the past.
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