Ten New Poems, Vol. II

by Christopher Watkins, (p)2006 preachsongsmusic/bmi, admin. by kobalt music

A Winter's Worth Of Hay

"Wishes are horses that kick you in the teeth
and then ask you if you'd like another ride."
-Richard Mezey

No horse to kick me in the heart.
Just a fat, bitter white pony to
rattle the tin can of its hoof
against these sullen grey fence-posts,
opposite of which
I stand and offer carrots.
Asking nothing in return
but recognition
for the broad and ugly tooth-marks
in my knuckles.

Circadian Rhythms

Leaves guard
their precious colors
like rouge,
even as their molting
skins
turn the tan
of the sand
when the sun
is bid farewell
by the great balding office
of the earth.

-

Frost
has tipped
the glistened baubles
of the sand;
more the mirror
of a clear winter sky
now than ever.

-

I wonder
at the weather;
should I weep
for Autumn's passing,
when the deaths
across this landscape
are as fleeting
as the first frozen
queries
of the snow
put to the leaves?

-

It was a funeral.
I was standing
with a man
who'd spent our years
telling me that death
was false,
that it was nothing
but dispersal
of some cells
that had briefly
come together
long enough
for us to grant
their tribe
a name.

Yet he was weeping,
and I asked him
"Tell me, why
is it you're weeping,
when you know
there's nothing
here
that we should mourn?"

And with his eyes
wide and supple
and as simple
and as clement
as a cow's,
he asked of me
"What better time than now?"

Death Masks Are True Portraits

A dead skunk laid out
along the stripe
in the center of the road,
its poor, rigid tail leaving off
where the flat line begins,
its death mask
asking me to laugh
at the irony and pain
of its passing.

The passing wheels
will pound its body
back into the pavement
until there's nothing left
but a faint over-ripeness in the air;
the viscosity of roadkill.

Doll Parts

Someone's plaything,
abandoned half-naked
to the asphalt road,
the incisions of the wheels,
and the patina of the fumes,
became dissevered.

We filmed it all in
stop-start,
clicked it every minute
of the day.

And with every passing battering
from a car,
what was once the ghastly plastic
cloying likeness of a baby
was increasingly
an eerie killing field.

Played back,
it was a child
with the hard-jerking
heart of a bomb.

Down Train Philharmonic

Rain,
the return of circulation
to a numbed extremity,
sprinkles the pane
as stars would
a black quilt of sky,
with the hiss and laugh
of gravel
spun up by anxious wheels
of midnight.

Little else to follow,
the winds have gone to haunt
another country hollow.

Puddles get so deep
when the flooding comes,
they develop waves and tides
of their own,
taking and replacing
beds of rock and pebble,
remaking their own waterscapes,
redrawing all their shores
with every droplet.

In the clop of dropping water,
the sound of an album closing down,
needle at the center of the lacquer
locked into the endless inner orbit
of a world around a spool.

When the needle drops again
to rekindle all the harmonies
scratched into the black,
the mind will be reminded
of a rail guard coming down,
the train that it salutes,
and the disappearing whine of the whistle
as it blends into the brume.

Now, seems to say
your damp conductor's brow,
we are finally making music
for the gods.

Exit The Dragon

Was a time
when this old man
passing
by me in the park

would have led
me to a song.
Now, I find
that I am interested

only in the leaves
that shake above his head,
the grass
beneath his boots,

the breeze
around his shoulders,
and the pale gravy mucus
of the moonlight.

When he asks
me for a light,
down in my
mind,

I am burning
down a forest,
and snapping
at the sparks

as a dog
does after bubbles.
I say no,
and I can tell,

by the pain
in his expression,
he has felt
the mobbing heat

that is curled back in my mouth,
and he knows
that I could torch
him in an instant.

As he walks away
I notice,
for the first time,
that his scarf

is the color
of a vein
in a fragrant
block of cheese.

And for that simple shade
I will remember him
with honor
after all.

Though not
with a song,
but with a
match.

Lucy Downstairs

Maybe this time,
befitting the worries of Lucy downstairs,
the rain won't stop.

She thinks it's the end of the world.
"New Hampshire," she said,
"look at all the rain they're getting."

I was on her floor tonight,
in her portion of the house,
to see about getting our heat turned on.

Hers is a world
of thick coral carpet
and low-hung lights.

Shadowed relatives;
pictures of progeny on
over-waxed mantles.

Everything dark
as the dye that creeps up
towards the dog-skin white of her roots.

We spoke about New Orleans,
God the un-named elephant between us.
I mentioned Mother Nature,

and we agreed that something,
somewhere,
was angry.

She turned our heat up,
groaned darkly,
and led me to the door.

When I reached out
to close it behind me,
I found her hand instead.

That was it,
we didn't clasp
with any real significance,

but it was strange
all the same.

She went back
to the grand-motherly murk
of her revelation murmurs,

and I ascended up to
our hopefully soon-to-be-warmer
winter rental in New York.

Where all I could think was,
New Hampshire?

Tatterdemalion

What a great race of birds
the gulls nearly were,

before the easy temptations
of our wasteful humankind

drew them down from the sky
and left them greased up in our bowels.

This one, with the bloody-colored
inner lips and throat,

who displays for us his need
by first screeching at the ground,

then at the sky,
still harbors in his eye

that trace of ice
and burning marble

that identifies his heritage
as gentry, gone to seed.

Under a curse,
even he knows

he must beg the ground first.

The Frequencies Of Going On Forever

Heart cast an anorexia of spirit,
pub-wood dark,
across our in-connected
seventh stage of grief;
a mesa never liquid in the sun,
a sound amputated from the sea.
Where crows slowly gather in their numbers,
and squirrels war to win their precious nuts.
Where hi, mid, and lo come together
in a treatise on the irreligious dark.
Whose hands-only votes will be tallied,
then interred above some deep human stone.

Do the squirrels believe the ghosts of my ancestors
haunt the manic nut-meat dreams of their young?
And the crows, for their part, do they find
the taste of my earth a little sweeter?

Underwing Down

A million-and-a-half
Whisper-soft
And trembling birds
Rode the wind
To warmer climes;
What they left behind
Were frailties,
Underwing down,
And now it's all over the ground
Like cotton balls
Stretched by dirty fingers.