Maureen Doallas
Brokered Words
The frost hasn’t finished
with the kill. There’s time, still — to feel the ground give while you silver full into too-late middle years, your nights, murmurous discontents, startling their way into your deepening sleep. Claim what is restless to last, even as your sight like a snow cloud thickens, and your breath, exhausting its missed but heart-paced rhythms, catches on these, my brokered words of love. This poem was first published by John D. Blasé at The Beautiful Due. |
A Fault in the Light ~
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Beat Work
A good cop never wants
to be taking a code 7 at the scene, needs his eye for detail, a body to put a finger on. No house mouse, a good cop wants to collar, be a closer, stake out truth from lie. The right tactical gear to ram a bolted door, a warrant to search and seize keep a good cop in the bag, not chasing lost time. A good cop learns to know a stalker’s MO, track a snitch’s mate and motive, probe a person of interest with a history and time to give up a statement. Even when things go sideways, a good cop never goes down not knowing where the bright blue line’s been drawn. Inside Serra
...you always have to find where the boundary
is in relation to the context... ~ Richard Serra You could be polished, put on a shiny face but for that alchemical mixing of oxygen with the elemental, leaving you earthy and russeted, uncosseted: more your own style. Your steely Cor-Ten skin corrodes Itself eating browned orange to amber, a matte time duly applies to tone your iron-ored heaviness as you tilt and sway for emphasis. I see you for what you are, a hulking tactile multi-ton torque shedding one look for another. That spring at the Dia, a train’s ride out of New York’s claustrophobia, your massiveness moved me inside your insides. I could have come unfurled, climbed your walls curling and sinuous and closing in the farther I go in. Your curves wrap their sinewy rustiness round me, impressing on me their muscle meant to make me weigh the arcs of meaning you achieve even while standing perfectly still. Your path takes me deep. Not till I look up do I get how the dark and the light work in tandem. Precious Few Words~A Villanelle ☊
I have few precious words to grind,
to work through meaning cold lips deny. It's time, you said; you changed your mind. I urge you stay. You rush to go, to put behind my mourning long from quick goodbyes that leave no precious words to grind, to parse how love could track so blind and barbed to make me red- and redder eyed. It's time, you said; you'd changed your mind, found others do where no oaths bind. To me your promise once gave lie, such precious word I grieve to grind. No riddle solved, no reason find. This heart you took and broke; but why? It's time, you said; I've changed my mind. From you I turn; I speak, unkind. This bitterest root I plant yet cry, Leave me some precious words to grind. No time, you said; I've changed my mind.
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Consider the Pomegranate
All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie . . .
~ W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” 1 Consider the pomegranate this winter, peeled back, crimson-lipped against gleamed teeth, each an ivory-handled knife slashing to pith, loosing the fruit’s elixir, staving hunger freed. Persephone’s mouth Pluto stained, sealing her fate that she might mime not spring but his own Hades six months of twelve. 2 Think of the Nile, candles on the water, luminaries jewel-cut, heat-polished, fit to a crown for mourning’s wear. What fabled kohl-eyed queen might stake, her sinuous path to desert ends. Sphinx her secrets none betrayed, the asp held high and striking quick her favors’ protests, white jasmine veils so summoned, stilled. 3 Regard the signs that bullets make of dreams still falling in Cairo’s streets, rejoined on a bridge of martyrs, relayed in Alexandria split seconds before white smoke succeeds the sound of metal against dry bone pierced, pieced, and quelled. What round of arms in arms begins with chanting sweet street songs. 4 Imagine the taste of orange crossed with pomegranate, scarlet-jacketed, seed-plucked, the juice half-blood-blushed, too soon anti-oxidant thin, a watered-down wine dizzying bandaged heads held where desires mapped before lockdown, fidelity trapped in gesture, rock and stick in hand, breach barriers in season’s coldest month. 5 See who cannot be counted, their numbers tolling with every step advanced before spinning turrets, their breaths, hoarsely formed, rising as hints of their morning selves, revealing code in a fluttering of hands, tri-colored flags making their own love poems, streaming as water in a garden in Babel, wind on the bridge carrying hopes like confetti. 6 Fix fast. The pomegranate once straight razor slashed becomes itself in pieces. Passed hand to hand in Tahrir Square, its sections sweeten lips’ loudest demands, bear fuel for the burning on the ground; its skin, peeling away, discarded with the silence remanded in evening prayers no longer holding firm.
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