You, with others & In the beginning
by Michael Bagwell
[ poetry - july 12 ]
You, with others
You are 600 years of smoke columns
twisting into shapes over an open field.
Your skin is an approximation only.
You search incessantly through a box of screws
but have no image of what you want to find.
An attendant speaks but your clawing
drowns him out like the grinding of a transmission.
He touches a palm to your shoulder
in some form of affection and you manage
to mumble back words like one-inch metal cylinders.
You leave them as a gift, son to father,
and they turn to smoke in his hands.
You become a wooden ladder,
a checkered tablecloth,
a crack in porcelain.
You write letters to your selves
and leave them in places
you wouldn’t think to look.
You take off the skin suit
and hang it from a hook in the mantle
through the left nostril
where smoke still lingers.
In the beginning
In the beginning,
eyes rolled forth from
electric sockets like boulders
down the ice face,
a glacier in repose.
My uncle, centered in the iris,
threw a duck headlong into
the branches of a Japanese Maple.
These were the stars
and within his eyes,
electric sockets,
flowing.
