The Flow of Morning
By Gene Walker
A crow does a drunkard’s dance
looting the weeds with assiduous eyes.
Her movements are sudden and fierce
and a hundred feet away
I hear the hunger of her young.
I see the quivering heart of
the moth, whose dreams of immolation
end under the soaring sun.
The flow of morning
swallows up the sound
of this machinery, and
like this poem,
does a drunkard’s dance
outside my window.
And though I have giant wings
I stalk the weeds
with this delicate staccato
still caught in my throat.
Labyrinth
By Gene Walker
The sun comes out in sympathy
and lends me a face for the day.
It is loathsome and defiant,
an old man’s skin,
misshapen and askew, jewelry
dangling from my temple.
I have come to see the names
for myself. Like the sparrow,
tentatively, one and two at a
time until the labyrinth is
filled.
By night, they soar in
the resplendent light of
our lithium powered brains.
Glowing like planets
yet to be named.
I brought an ancient instamatic
and my list of plagues
but my name does not appear.
In this snaking line,
I am just another
former beauty,
seeking self and sleep
from a tiny capsule
as my number nears.
So Far Across the Yard
By Gene Walker
Her father’s tools have turned to rust
while she was learning to die,
her towering bones now crammed
into heat – rotted boxes,
curbside for Monday morning pick up:
fancy fruit.
A few have come to touch these too
ls, to tell us what he did to her
the heavy lead like hammers
as big as the crates they lay in,
empty wooden tombs
now void of any instruments
except a red – brown dust
The grime of life
and living.
We are safe now, so far across the yard
free to fly back to our,
tiny, ten- fingered, little boy bodies,
free to see the shapes for ourselves.
She has collected one of every leaf
that has fallen she left,
and still he is here,
his piercing insect eye
squinting at the squatting wire body
before him, my own shapeless little tree
beyond the glass. His shadow
seizes me, and even today
his eyes are your eyes, and at night
they are a myriad moving reflections,
a fabulous guilded moon. . .
and I am his earth.
Longevity
By Gene Walker
I cannot sustain your voyages,
these corrosive mingling’s of
hydrogen and oxygen,
seeking the green rivers of your blooms.
The ants in your throat.
the carvings on your body,
your graphitied limbs.
It is the air that breathe
that is now stalking your longevity,
this vessel for my mind’s plagues
Your waterless spheres are now collapsed,
sunken in the enormous pressure
that now threatens your capillaries.
They too conspire against us,
as we abandon our skins
to count our ribs,
with them, you shall perish,
without them, I shall
And as we jettison our empty and entangled nets,
the last silver fish is blue again,
searching the underwater winds
to tell his tale
to the gravity of silence
between us.
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| Gene Walker |
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