Chinese Whispers: Poems Read Online Free Page B

stuffs.
    More
    keeps coming out about the dogs. Surely a simple embrace
    from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.
    There’s a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
    but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried
    in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
    I yell to the ship’s front door,
    wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
    I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.
    It always turns out that much is salvageable.
    Chicken coops
    haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business
    with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night.
    It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,
    the air was digestible, the fish tied in love knots
    on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys
    were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances
    and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.
    Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you,
    bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:
    the knowledge that this isn’t history,
     no matter how many
    times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines
    trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle
    warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overridden:
    Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes,
    stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales,
    dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter
    to us, these tunes
    carried by the wind
    from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time
    to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age
    have softened us up a little more.
      Then we’ll see how extinct
    the various races have become, how the years stand up
    to their descriptions, no matter how misleading,
    and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you
    on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur
    of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it.
    The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.
    Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them
    without noticing. We, too, are taller,
    our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured
    with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,
    according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,
    a secret thread.
    Peace is a full stop.
    And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,
    now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,
    for what purposes we do not know.

IN THE TIME OF PUSSY WILLOWS
    This is going to take some time.
    Nope, it’s almost over. For today anyway.
    We’ll have a beautiful story, old story
    to fish for as his gasps come undone.
    I never dreamed the pond of chagrin
    would affect me this much. Look, I’m shaking,
    shrinking with the devil
    in the stagy sunrise he devised.
    Then there will be no letters for what is truth,
    to make up the words of it. It will be standing still
    for all it’s worth. A hireling shepherd came along,
    whistling, his eyes on the trees. He was a servant of two masters,
    which is some excuse, although not really all that much of a one.
    Anyway, he overstayed his welcome. The last train had already left.
    How does one conduct one’s life amid such circumstances,
    dear snake, who want the best for us
    as long as you’re not hurt by it?
    My goodness, I thought I’d seen a whole lot of generations,
    but they are endless, one keeps following another,
    treading on its train, hissing.
    What a beautiful old story it could be after all
    if those in the back rows would stop giggling for a minute.
    By day, we paddled and arbitraged
    to get to this spot. By night it hardly matters.
    Strange we didn’t anticipate this,
    but the dumbest clues get overlooked by the smartest gumshoe
    and we’re back in some fetishist’s vinyl