Extra, Extra: Poetry

Photograph by Andrew Waits for City Arts.

HOW MY FAMILY GRIEVED

Many things are pointless.

The word unbearable.

Other things have edges.
I’ll get Molly from school today.

We sandpapered down to the meaning of necessary things.
Among the condolence cards that jack-potted through
the mail slot daily was this one.
I was so sorry to hear about Beth. I was also
surprised to find out that Karen isn’t married yet.
When humor gets too black, it turns into night.
The card had a sunset on the cover.

We twisted our hair into nets, watched
the bridges of each other’s noses for jumpers.
The CIA could not have watched Molly more closely.

One day when I was alone with her, she said,
Auntie, why are you crying?
Lying is one of the pointless things.
            I’m crying about your mommy.
She doesn’t want you to cry.

It’s possible to sharpen the lead in a pencil
until the tip is so fine it becomes invisible.
It slices the air into particles as you lower it,
but as soon as it touches paper, it breaks.

Breaking is a pointless thing.

GALACTIC CANNIBALISM

Scientists say that galaxies, those spiral windings
that turn on themselves, (the legs of pole dancers,
the arms of Sufis), eventually bump into one another
in space, a clumsy polka, and finding each other, begin
to eat one another, like evenly matched cannibals
on a famished hunt, they start with the arms
and chew their way into deeper gravity.

Here is the danger of scientists and metaphor.

Galaxies do not sit in the black basement of space,
in the clock-less sleep of space, in the crow feather empty
of space waiting patiently for a meal. Their dance is less
polka, more tango, orbiting one another carefully,
a billion years of eye contact. Our own lonely Milky Way
has not known the touch of spiral arms since the big bang
erased all her home phone numbers.

Those great collections of dust when they touch, scientist,
are not devouring each other with their clumsy explosions
and sudden changes in gravity.

They are kissing
in the brief candlelight of their own suns.

MY JOB

In the lawn chair, bare toes—
the earthworm grass, crushed cans of Olympia
dandelion around me, three mosquito bites  from a
personal record, re-checking the placement of Mars,
plastic cross hatches branding my bread thighs.

Electra has already slipped into the neck of Scorpio.
The dogs are loose. Orion doesn’t come to Cassiopeia,
but she waits. Another pop top lets loose its hiss and
spit. I was born for this.

Read our interview with Finneyfrock in the March issue of City Arts.