Poetry

Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorse
would turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so much

If time is money then how much might the bookie’s runner’s leather shoes have cost? To start: Tommy takes a watering can and tends the window boxes on his window sill.

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.

There is no title. There is no title. The body is content. The body is window.
The body is container, curtain, chair, grid. Do you see? Bones & shoulders, a spine

No car to drive to the dump and too embarrassed 
to borrow one, you scrape the black mold 
off the underside as best you can, muscle it 
onto your shoulder. Spores multiplied to the size 

She died & I—
In the spring of her blood. I remember
my mother’s first injury. The surprise of unborn
petals curling light, red, around her wrist.

Sorting through the chest’s junk, I happened
on this picture of him, a stranger I lived with 
month-to-month while I looked for something

We had to present proof for everything:  
My mother was born 
August 31, 1954. On that day 
inside the womb of a minute 
she burst from another woman’s life, 

More dark than gray, but not yet quite dark
entirely, the stories keep ending as if there were
a limit to what any story could hold onto, and this
the limit, the latest version of it, looking a lot like the sea
meeting shore.