3 Poems

SMASHWORDS EDITION

***

Published By

Angus Brownfield on Smashwords

Copyright © 2011 by Angus Brownfield

This work may be shared, copied and transmitted as long as it is not for profit. If it is shared, copied or transmitted, it must be attributed to the author. Permission is required to republish it in any form whatsoever, as in an anthology.

1. A Pie-Eyed Dog And A Guinea Pig

We should have had a son named Stephen, a Polish son
with an Irish grin and Scottish eyes.
We should have made immense important love
on sand dunes and in forests and at sea,
lapping each other’s juices and crying each other’s cries,
swollen with life and glued fast with need.

Not to be. We’ve no son, just a pie-eyed dog and a guinea pig— never went to the dunes nor forest and the sea is the one
we’re lost in, called Life.

But we’ve cried our cries and drank our kisses
and life goes on to the end, a raft amid the swells, a hank of rope
for a rudder and the joy of immense conversation on rain-drenched nights.

2. Damned Spot

Spot, overgrown apartment dog, is expert at lying down.
Also knows stretching, mooching, sighing, eating.
Bored, his common state (stupored more precisely) he licks,
Great slurping licks: toes, ankles, flank and, leg raised, his privates.
After first meal, until he does his survival trick:
Napping. Dog of all traits, mister of none.
Just before last meal comes the pearl of his day, the Walk.
He knows the ritual: closet, leash, the changing of shoes.
Then he dances, a performer for a dutiful audience of one,
An uberaged apartment dweller named Nicodemus
Whose only trick is endurance.

3. Epicenter Of An Aching Heart

I tried to write a poem but that muse left me
somewhere east of Deprivation and south
of Aching Heart, thumbing a ride up north
to Hope—from which I’ll crawl, if need be—to
Reunion. Bet on it, I’ll make it, but let none say
love’s portable, that you can love what you can’t see
that it’s the same a thousand miles apart.

Sex, they say, ‘s a little death—oh no:
Absence is. You or I, it makes no difference which,
might as well be dust. And if that’s so, let it be me.
I suffer your absence too poorly to survive. I need to touch,
to speak, to muss your hair and hold your wee self
against me, nose to nose or cheek to cheek.

Come back and call me Lazarus.

~~~