Two Poems

II.

These days I’ve taken to agreeing with everyone,
I agreed my cousin shouldn’t have worn
orange to her father’s wedding. I’d rather see it shorn
off her body as if she were a wooly one
of my sheep. I agreed we should have left everyone
waiting in hunger, just to let them ache some — mourn
the sliced neck and belly of a recently worn
lamb. It was its time anyway, I agreed. Everyone

knows what it’s like to be sheared, the stubble
that follows the shine. We tend to curl
like the peeled rind of an orange: a lung
or two in its first stage of shrivel falls to rubble,
a dry heaving, and that would be me: the girl
without any emotion wearing down her tongue.





VIII.

Believe me; it’s more than breath or shine
that’s kept us from falling. It was a glance
from a night paused for a slow dance.
I’m not sure when he became benign:
leaf scar. In rhythm, down the vine,
caught by a blossom, thrown in a trance
by its death. Thus is the desert’s stance:
all alone just kneading into itself. In fine,
that’s the way I saw him, the way he left
me — crisp as a leaf, we noted scars
and passed to the passings — still, I’ll gray
best I can, waft this way and that, bereft,
until I happen in like a line of scars
and crack like veins of a leaf: mid-air, mid-May.