Sinister: poor pissed poetry parrot

[Damon Seils]

(I'm unprepared.)

Thank you, Michele. The bird is now reciting passages from a self-help
book he picked up on the way down from New England. Something about
anger management. What exactly did you do to him?

With the two poems below, I send the Poetry Parrot even deeper into the
North American wilderness to JJ Fantastic Heldman, whose new Midwestern
surroundings require some sort of Sinister christening. It might as well
be the bird. JJ, you listening?

The first poem is by Marilyn Hacker. The second is by Sharon Olds.

- - - - - - -

Five-thirty, little one, already light
outside. From Spanish Harlem, sun spills through
the seamless windows of my Gauloise blue
bedroom, where you're sleeping, with what freight
of dreams. Blue boat, blue boat, I'll navigate
and pilot, this dawn-watch. There's someone who
is dying, darling, and that's always true
though skin on skin we would obliterate
the fact, and mouth on mouth alive have come
to something like the equilibrium
of a light skiff on not-quite-tidal waves.
And aren't we, when we are on dry land
(with shaky sea legs) walking hand in hand
(often enough) reading the lines on graves?

- - - - - - -

It

Sometimes we fit together like the creamy
speckled three-section body of the banana, that
joke fruit, as sex was a joke when we were kids,
and sometimes it is like a jagged blue comb of glass across
                            my skin,
and sometimes you have me bent over as thick paper can be
folded, on the rug in the center of the room
far from the soft bed, my knuckles
pressed against the grit in the grain of the rug's
                            braiding where they
laid the rags tight and sewed them together,
my ass in the air like a lily with a wound on it
and I feel you going down into me as
if my own tongue is your cock sticking
out of my mouth like a stamen, the making and
breaking of the world at the same moment,
and sometimes it is sweet as the children we had
thought were dead being brought to the shore in the
narrow boats, boatload after boatload.
Always I am stunned to remember it,
as if I have been to Saturn or the bottom of a trench in the
                           sea floor, I
sit on my bed the next day with my mouth open and think of it.

- - - - - - -

Damon
.
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