Elegy & Woodburner
by Adam Elgar
[ poetry - march 06 ]
Elegy
Spring came too early. By March she'd had enough.
Its rowdy promise was a persecution.
Even her years of health (all eight of them
and their electric dazzle) seemed occluded,
posed in sepia, her manners out of time,
a life foreclosed by a precocious shadow
like a convent wall.
Still... that was never
all of it. She threw good tantrums, and she picked
her nose in bridesmaid's mauve during her cousin's vows.
Now, when the bad days come and I can't get
the sap to rise, I'm sometimes tempted to believe
that this profane small saint could intercede for me.
Woodburner
It speaks mortality as I do language,
(native, unthinking) degrading
nature's bones to frost-pale ash,
a solace fierce enough to make
unwary hands immortal in no time.
How mad would that be?
It was time that made the tones and textures
(mossed, buttery, marble-veined;
cragged, ribbed, resinous, flaking)
hefted by my awkward love and stacked,
a kind of shame suffusing this left arm,
against the flagged alcove for future vanishing.
