"(She’s a maharani, ransacked as a house)"
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Proclitic
We were not brought together as the ancients predicted. We were vandals,
Trafficking in touch and go, devoid, with our brash sabers.
Often, though, the sun broke through, and when the ratters took off with their gopher snakes,
And there was no more milk and water between us,
We were tithers. And when the pigeon hawks
Hankered overhead like tom-toms in the distance
We were tongue-tied and cleated.
We gave up gloating and hogged our riches.
Nothing was truer than that:
Our trickle of permanence, our sprint to the hanging wall.
_______________________________________________________________ Sleeping Beauty
She likes it back there, spell-bound and rubbed smooth,
Without a substitute or any lingerer to listen in to her weariness
(She’s a maharani, ransacked as a house). And the harness of dream, and the error of disappearance,
Are normal, newsless, shining even, cadenced as a dance, swank.
And though she seeps like a suicide and can’t replenish the color of raw,
Her parted erasure is an intricate solitude, edgy, and scrubbed,
Like undergrowth. So that the error of one’s looking on dissolves the progress of her spirits.
And the clarity of what some called her hiccups, the cadaverish coughs—
These are the intimacies of the houseflies that rise and fall and strafe around her.
_______________________________________________________________