Ampersands & Pretzels

When it's over, when the lover's poems fail,
passion slips under and drowns.

--I helped ours down.

In a casket made by a missionary long ago
I sent your words beneath the loch,
I banished everything there,
saw it all slip under and drown,
built a fig-leaf bonfire on my return,
piled chronicles on it, danced nude
beside the pyre.

I long for days of
long physical exertion, arms reaching out
to ampersand the legs, to bare yearning
down the middle.

I like it when, as pretzel master,
you let me knot you to my mood, saying,
swivel me! I un-bun my hair
to eat you of course without silverware.

 

 

lerato

you left
for work
without
a word/
I felt nuts,
smoking
the cleft
of day/
a bird
is caught
by time
till
twilight wraps
my thought
and feathers
fly home/
I feel nuts
again, then
you tap on
the padauk
door
which I go
to open
with the
other hand.
[?]


 

 

Sunrise

I saw in the distance a god
sucking life through a straw, sucking
the silence; then she darted in a blur
to where, behind a bush,
pygmies pumped air into a beach-ball,
chuckling and slapping smeared hands on it,
till it took the redness of Basotho dye
used by graduates at mountain schools;
they released it, watched it go up, up,
giggling in fields of breakfast
as they ran behind it,
leaping to touch the bottom
now out of reach.

---

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