Three poems
Joan Miró’s Mujer
for Janet Holmes
sometimes the body feels too terrestrial: while the face is all about comets: and the rings of Saturn: meteor eye: say picture frame of the universe: there’s a cavity that shapes a tilted tear: water-wanter: lack of lakes: could river: try tributary and fill: stand and sing out a world into existence: live potential: shimmy: shimmer like distant super giants: don’t talk about the body’s miraculous failings: move your arms: so small they gesture tight orbits: don’t talk about your crooked smile: face it: symmetry is a stupid myth
Still Life with Mandolin
for Ada Limón
sound hole of seeds: a thumbnail moon to strum the strings of a lyric body: nourishment and lullaby: blue curtain night: greensleeves on greenleaves: ear twitch: god tonight the animals want to sup on the tender flesh of music: sprout tune: vibrate: glisten: sprout and root: fill the room with acoustic aroma: tart sweetness: seed queen: lean into lyric wondering: tendril and pluck: the musicians gather: fruit heart: they bow: they plead play in the new day
Spellbound Ball
for Patricia Wallace Jones
this evening the ghosts are rising up to dance in the old fashioned way: the piano has a ghost of a cello in its eye: it says love in the same dark key all night: spectral gowns sweeping the floor: the wood of the instrument still remembers being a try: but it is so difficult to put that into notes: lion’s paw piano leg: a mustache of keys: the ghosts get closer to their partners: elaborate merry-go-round: you want to touch the face of the piano: you want to sit with it a while: talk the way you always do: in another key
