Hello. I’m nobody. Can we talk?
If it's not music promising
easy sex,
it's my men on all fours.
If it's not a stone
it's a whirlpool,
& home at gauntlet's end
wrinkles & mirrors us.
What's our story?
A quest for loopholes.
Cling to stinking underbellies
of rams one minute,
out-seduce
the seductress the next.
What's our light?
We make blackness into
Solomon's dusk.
Our best enemies are giants,
foul weather making us
a tribe of ire,
or great devilish nations,
so we use slings
or sharpened sticks
dipped in shit,
dress in motley,
in sleepwear, or as a forest
inching to the castle,
practice patience
plowing fields round and
round
the giant forever
falling down,
a project collapsing
in on itself.
Giants never need
to grow up,
but if they stop
nursing at the Earth
they petrify and weaken.
Then we make pilgrimages
to see them in stone.
Now it’s just a few drops
of red ink,
what you said turning your
head
toward my ear,
the theater emptying out,
a big opening, closing sound,
light amplifying it,
your warm breath at my ear.
There up ahead a white
rectangle, a scar in it.
The red letters
in the epidermis
of your fingers, difficult to
decipher, you have to know
they're there,
and in your right cheek
a plea in a simple code—
some would say
a blush, others
a flaw, a blemish,
but it's a way to know you,
to save our ship.
Please be quiet,
now just hush up
say goodnight.
In the morning
a box on the bed,
at night an empty movie
house,
in the morning a box.
The sea is charcoal,
ashes,
your cheek a red ship in it
to the new, improved dirt.
What I was told:
He was chopping firewood.
What I imagined:
The long-handled axe
overhead
in a human-scaled
simulacrum
of the mercy stroke
coming down
inside his heart.
And then a stone sermon
came to me
from some
Alexandrian library
of what time
has been, is, shall be.
And then a picture
came to me
of a cathedral's
Gothic clock
with bronze figures
revolving
out of a steeple's
stone archway
to hammer
the bells, tell time.
What was he to me
but a telephone voice full
of serrated wit,
that to listen to
was to hear
the natural
and unnatural talk.
Now he is what
he always was,
a musical saw.
Today the world is:
wafted through
the beleaguered
window's screen.
All the fine interstices
have trapped a tan powder,
the evidence of days.
Do you see real mountains
from your window?
Do you say to yourself—
inasmuch as
your better half
isn't around—
I think I'll take
a little nap now.
I could hear birds, maybe
that wren
who makes a wayside
out of the trilled notes
in her throat.
What comes through
your window screen
with the wren's fable
might be a breeze,
with it a whiff
of balsam,
and this should be sufficient
until tomorrow's
afternoon respite,
replete with the first lilacs.
Then you'll be
once more an agent
passing the world on to us.
After the days
lawn faced
the sky's blue indifference,
then the parade
of clouds
rolling like floats west,
it looked up at
one or two stars
bordered by
two darkening maples
and one big willow.
The lawn had
no eyes
but the dizzy boy and girl
lying at day's end
on it did.
Then honeysuckle
along the rotting fence
gave away
its sweet smell,
its nectar to late bees,
to hummingbird moths.
And to a boy plucking
its stamens
and sucking
their sweetness.
Then other children
gathered
with names like
Diane and Roger
and one was
blindfolded,
spun,
the others disappearing.
Dennis Finnell is from St. Louis, had over thirty jobs in his working life—not that "retirement" isn't a job—from Chevy truck assembly line to real estate sales (where he sold zilch). He has taught at a few colleges and universities, including Tennessee, Wesleyan, and Mount Holyoke, and ended working life as a financial aid administrator. Dennis has lived with his blessed wife for the last forty years in western Massachusetts.