Found in Willow Springs 67
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This Poem Doesn’t Care That It Isn’t a Sonnet
This poem doesn't care about the movie Avatar,
dosen't care about IPods or Notebooks or
the divorce of reality from reality; it isn't
thinking of animal shelters, three million plus
deaths per year; this poem isn't thinking
of oil or children or ice melting with climate
that is here or not here; this poem has nothing
to do with the bodies of women which have
ceased to move on cots or sidewalks; this poem
doesn't know the legal age of marriage for
girls in Ethiopia, Sir Lanka, Saudi Arabia etc.;
it has stopped looking for the name of the one
killed in a bus by a bomb, in a car by a sniper,
on the path by a tripwire, in a house, in a crib.
This poem isn't waiting for pain's reprieve,
for grief to pack up its tools for another heart's
pale. It is hungry for milk, for the messages
of pillow and sheet; it wants the drowse
of the egg in the open nest, a plain thing, in-
effable brim of shade, yellow apples ripening.
Pain Thinks of Black
This is damage the body
remembers--
a snowy landscape
Pain swept with one hand.
Pain Thinks of Still Life
without landscape black beneath
white without wind without interuption
Pain thinks of still life without charcoal
& seeds without burnish & soil Pain thinks
of iris lapis lazuli light without leaf
without breath Pain thinks of still life
without eternity meeting the air
