poem of the day
'Fairy Tale in Reverse' by Jeffrey McDaniel
If only we'd planted a black box in your skull,
like the ones dug out of airplane wrecks,
we could've salvaged your last thoughts,
and known, if not why, at least what,
but all we have is a body: the bruised
alabaster of your thighs, make-up so thick
a picnic could sink in it, legs so thin and sickly
they weren't even bones, but diminishing
chimes of hope, and your heart: a time bomb
that took twenty-six years to explode.
*
'Romantics' by Lisa Mueller
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.
If only we'd planted a black box in your skull,
like the ones dug out of airplane wrecks,
we could've salvaged your last thoughts,
and known, if not why, at least what,
but all we have is a body: the bruised
alabaster of your thighs, make-up so thick
a picnic could sink in it, legs so thin and sickly
they weren't even bones, but diminishing
chimes of hope, and your heart: a time bomb
that took twenty-six years to explode.
*
'Romantics' by Lisa Mueller
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.