Poems

by Griffin R.K.

‘May Rain’

This new sky’s weather is

the bane of the Agiads and Eurypontids:

the meteor showers less like showers

and more like tears or tears and some

black planet interred in the bosom of Gemini

makes a single man well aware

of his being the afterbirth of the destiny

of many another man.

‘Dark Continent’

To the swatting of a fly or perhaps

the sucking of a tick; or, to the new

turmeric sky, once black but now red and

slick that Venus might ’cross its length slide—her

witless droll, her slow pantomime. Or, to

the bodies melting in the stomachs of

the Barbary cats thronged in a valley

who swallowed and enjoyed every hand who

could brush aside the dry grass in their fur.

‘The Blazing World’

I’ll leave the hot kiss upon the paprika skin,

e’er beneath the descending heavy air—moving anew,

breathless the night might’ve been; but leave a long blue

exhale, now that the sun winks and the wrinkled moon

draws upon a deep red sea.

‘Two Quatrains’

The roaring siege engine gores at its leisure,

breaks the uncertain Avatar, gripped for the first

time—burning coals at her feet: the floor of the

club. Her legs are thicker than she remembers.

I’ll emerge from the darkness, empty-handed:

I poured what I had to fill them with you. My

palms will be turned up, steam still rising; and

I’ll be shoeless, a starving ghost—Boddhisatva.

‘Carpe Diem’

Pleasure

asleep in your arms,

though I can’t know

when or that I am.

Lover

to be buried with,

reclining back into a death

with those same velvety insides

behind closed eyes.

‘Carpe Diem (II)’ — for George Herbert

Blood that in veins runs

then under skin is stilled

might make raptures undone;

but us in each other, un-killed.

‘Avril’

The women stalking crow-like

or dove-like in their knee length jackets

under the sloping brow of early springtime showers:

ladies-in-waiting to all-new hints of desire. Suddenly,

the smell of grass’s blood,

and the sound of rain playing her single song

—the very Earth her dulcimer.

‘Sardanapalus’

A naked foot stalking upon silk; a lanthorne burning;

the strings of a dulcimer plucked one after another.

The adobe walls of a womb: a throng swelling;

and then flung into the full-mooned sky,

a man by the black wings of a crow,

crying. Turning away now he scans both the sea

and the sky, just to see the stars roving on in

both, like a muse in the artist’s eye; and

the wind is very cold again.

‘Haiku (I)’

An Angel unto

Earth a gender mulatto;

roving souls in hell.

‘Haiku (II)’

I notice when you

gaze into your cup before

sips like a scryer.

‘Haiku (III)’

She moves awkwardly:

the beautiful amateur

dances how water drips.

‘Aubade’

Your suitcase

useless by the door

a constant threat

to our uneasy symmetry

when that which cracks dawn

also splits earth.

‘Quatrain’

A wine-lined kiss with the dewy precision

of a rose thorn, and the world in her sunburned nape.

Do the pains in these things not seem so strange

like a chancre beneath lipstick?