3 poems
Fable 11
I was reading a book on the brain, heartened by the company
of a body, mine, yes, but a body nonetheless, and so a mystery.
And my brain said, I know, I too am lost. Just where in here
does the ghost reside. Is the self an ache of light in a PET scan
or the whole dark field in which it shines. I have an idea. Why
not visit the grave of our father. And when we arrived, the field
filled with diamonds, bouquets of jewels laid over the names you
could not see to read. They were just that loved. Here lies…
and then the slowly melting ice of words fading out of practice.
How terrible the river long ago that opened these scars, the season
of the endless rain, and the bones we loved gemmed the shoreline
of Loch Haven. Just whose was whose, impossible to tell. So
the scatter became equally personal, and never personal enough.
And as we gathered the remains, we said a little prayer, unaware
our lips were moving, we whispered, I am sorry, as if anointed earth
spoke through us, whoever we were, to any stranger who will listen.
Fable 14
The guitarist in the window makes a visual music, and sometimes
a voice presses through, sometimes the instrument turns to light
the moment you break its path. If I were a guitar, I would lay a shade
of midnight in every toy and flower. I would take on the specter
of the garden the way a radio takes on the news. Birds gather
at the effigy because someone thought to give it trees. And yes,
a song could stop us. It could flutter into the mouths of strangers
who make this marble personal. Thus begins the back and forth.
The wordless pick up where we leave off, expanding time a little.
You can do that. You can put your hands to the fire in its steel drum
and sing along in silence. You could stare as one more spoke
in a wheel pinned to the visual music, as everything solid turns to air.
Fable 16
But now and then, a spiritual advisor sends a text. You
do not know me, he says, but we were flesh and bone
in a former life. Trust me, he says. I know you better
than you know yourself. And as you wipe away the words,
you hear the whoosh of a sea-wave coming ashore. One,
two, and, god forbid, a million, and your phone turns to
a tiny breathing machine in a hospital wing where no one
visits, save the flowers as they pass the door. Was that you
who said every dawn is an image of dusk, you who made
yourself an ocean, who surged, finger by finger, across
the cries of love, over and over, until you fell into a mantra,
and the messages piled up for no one, and nothing grew
too tired to sleep, a stranger to your body, your friends,
and a stretch of earth lunged seaward as the tide withdrew.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-seven books including, most recently, Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Parlor Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse Press, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019) and The Calling (Parlor Press, 2020). Forthcoming books include Patmos (Juniper Award, U of MA Press) and Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.