"Le Roy du Sentiment" and "Spare the Snowman"
Le Roy du Sentiment
If there were only crows
there would be no
we to watch them flap up
and subside like people
clearing their throats to speak
or settling in a chair.
The crow king detects
shiny things with eyes
you can’t see behind
shades perched on his
pasty round face that floats
in the darkness like Roy’s
in grainy black and white
crooning wistfulness and loss
we all know with an eerie
mastery whose nature is
unfathomable, like an
alien intelligence.
Something glimmers
in there, and I’m going back
one day, come what may,
to Blue Bayouuuu,
some day in January
when the world
warms up and black rags
flap in the branches.
Spare the Snowman
Hank built his snowman with the intent
of demolishing it, giant baby with a clementine nose and
sweetgum-ball eyes, and whacked at it first with a plastic
scythe and then with a croquet mallet, over my protest,
but he could not do it, that lopsided face stared up so trustingly,
so he threw his weapons down and pressed his cheek
against its cold white cheek. Marquee Shakyamuni with a halo
of colored neon lights on the calendar, tonight and every night,
just as you are. The snowman’s face falls out, snow releasing the
half-fruit, the spiky seed balls, no eye ear nose tongue body mind.
I walk beside the river where the bark of the birch tree rolls back
like peeled skin, as if a damp new tree could step out of itself
and go walking, leave its tall husk behind. As the river swirls
and dimples, you can hear the hum of the bridge like the day
singing of spring, and there is a shifting between one center
of gravity and another, like when a snowman melts and tilts
more to one side and its body has little finger-holes of snow where
the air pockets inside of it have become exposed, and none of us knows
at this moment what we want or even what our shape is, only
that we do want, and will keep melting into something else, bodies
lattices of structure and space singing as wishes move over us like cars
or air masses pushing clouds, thundering suddenly as they
rush into empty space.
