Someone upstairs drills silence.
He is changing mosaic of living .
Baby cannot follow fan moving.
Its creak vanishes in drill sound.
She tells mom we will go to roll
In middle of bed in sea side flat,
After noon when there is silence
And she can follow fan’s moving
Here there is a sea wind at door
And see, how eyes flutter about
Dreams in them moving rapidly.
Stomach feels like milky world.
Milky laughter behind eyelids
Seems to rotate like silky stars
As though her recent new life
Is laughing matter in her belly.
She may not be existentialist,
Crinkling eyes at old sunlight,
A sun and a moon conflating
Darkness in her inner eyeballs
Or too much milk in stomach
Or excess moonshine in a sky
As moon plays hide and seek
with cloud in full view of sea.
She is merely burping her gas
Says mom who is sleeping by.
We could re-enact a formal pain
Like when it happened last year
Or some centuries ago, a formal
Event inside the stone of nerves
Nerves grown dumb like tombs
That froze marble for dead wife.
Formal feeling is made of stone,
As our hands and feet are froze,
Wife or son or bleeding prophet,
We freeze sorrow in a slow river
The way glacier flows and melts
Bodies shall flow with no clutter.
(Reading Emily Dickinson’s poem “After a great pain a formal feeling comes”)
I re-live an October memory of loss
As if the crows are second thoughts,
A second chance to live past a pain.
While the waves rise and fall in sea,
All through October, red moon is up,
Its gentle face soft and round again.
October goes and it will be a winter
Of a cold forgetfulness in sea’s belly.
Hunger is cave bat inside body
Shouting out like from its cave.
Its echoes ring like bat’s babies
Striking face as you enter cave.
Hunger grows big like cave bat
In a mountain of raucous want.
Hunger shouts for your money
Shrieking like dark bat in cave.
Train eats lumps of coal for its supper
Friendly bushes bide their dark states.
Their memory is green in its headlight
To be blanked out by moving shadows .
After supper train puffs peaceful pipe
Post-prandially with driver in headscarf.
No more black coal to fierce belly fires.
Stomachs are now at peace in scarves
Six umbrellas sit on the bench.
A rain is falling on all of them.
Two umbrellas dark as a night,
Join them at the green bench.
Sea sits behind them, in green.
A sky stands behind it in blue.
Sea has no umbrella above it.
Being high, a sky has neither.
Rain beats down on umbrellas.
They have to leave the bench.
The bench has no umbrellas.
It is now wet with the rainfall.
Umbrellas , folded and home,
Are dripping with a memory.
