Each day the small gods & My heart in a cheap brown suit
by Alex Boyd
[ poetry - july 06 ]
Each day the small gods
Each day the small gods come forward,
float small rafts of ideas, loaded
with words, some rolling overboard.
Two small gods can come together and make
a third - my father inhales to speak
on my voicemail and I remember he
gave me breath. Small gods know nothing
will stop tomorrow from sliding in,
the night rolls fiercely around outside
and they aren't foolish enough to believe
it thinks of them. Small gods stop
to see something important in the eyes
of a tiny, trembling dog, overhear words.
They sense talk falling all around you,
collecting on your eyebrows, so that you,
small god, have to shake it off like a dog.
Small gods lose memories, find them again,
like broken benches under melting snow.
Wonder about, claim to know larger gods,
who must have had an unknown reason
to slide wind onto a mist of rain, fill air
with drops screaming happily in decay.
Small gods are clean as bursting through paper.
A circus dwarf on the strong man's shoulders
belongs to small gods who know the strength
of the elbow, work from there. They reach out
with small arms, a few feet in every direction.
My heart in a cheap brown suit
My heart stopped believing we're all in this
together and left for America: I got a photo
of it, smiling with Las Vegas hookers.
Postcards said look, I pulled the cord
and started up thirty times over thirty cups
of coffee but none of it was anything.
It complained there were only some good days,
when instead of getting on the subway car
and finding everyone staring, half asleep clutching
papers, we met something different, an old cowboy
head to toe in yellow, eyes closed
concentrating on his six feet of brightness.
It watched a man sit cross-legged near the edge
of the platform, serious and tapping his hands,
then he stood up as the train arrived,
took one step and stopped, and it knew
he was practicing, but didn't say anything to him
out of some notion that it's his business.
I read the postcards and sense what was near it,
whistle of workers and clatter of ladders as
it sat in a stairwell, businessman in a black suit
on the bus next to it, body plump as a question
mark, sharp smell from his package of peanuts.
In the loopy handwriting, the jerking of the bus.
