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dapt-poems

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Lips are pressed as high as lovers
climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous
headdress, on the carved trumpet
of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face
of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight,
that some farsighted lover tried to open
with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty,
while others kissed its sybaritic mouth
to make a poem a prophecy.
So here is love alive
surviving the wreckage it survives,
a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight
to some other place, less aware,
more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.
This is the poem of death.
There is only one
and no other.
Enough now, enough has been said.
The spinning leaf will spin
like no other.
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.
Among physicians rich in their death watch
In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs,
Cradles of a century’s platitudes,
The stale air smelling of disinfectant
And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses,
Among the staring insomniacs of the day room,
The stroke victims on their rented gurneys,
Complaining orderlies and rattling carts
At the end of every purpose, act and form
I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.
Imagine half your face
rubbed out yet
you are suited up
and walking
to the office.
How will your mates
greet you?
with heavy hearts,
flowers,
rosary beads?
How shall we greet
the orphan boy,
the husband whose hand
slipped, children
and wife swept away?
How to greet
our new years
and our birthdays?
Shall we always
light a candle?
Do we remember
that time erases
the shore, grass
grows, pain’s
modified?
At Hikkaduwa
in 1980 I wrote a ditty,
a sailor’s song
about rain
in sunny Ceylon.
I don’t know
what Calypsonians
would compose
about this monstrous
wave, this blind hatchet man;
don’t know
the Baila singers’ reply;
we are a “happy and
go” people
yet the fisherman’s wife
knows
that her grandfather
was eaten by the ocean—