Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Nobody Gonna Beat Me at Nothin.

What has she told him
I wonder?
Apple cores and
empty tasses and
justification letters of
blank whiteouts with
specks of pepper?
Letters of It's Over and I'm Done.

You can tell me what it means but
God knows that I'd be a Virginia
and write on not knowing
an eekaleek of Greek.
Apple skins
like fine pores of faces
like that Talking Heads song,
seeing faces in movies.

Looking up behind you,
blue people smiling
or crying—
dying inside for the protagonist.
Faces in movies
that sometimes get out of focus
if the film knob gets bumped
or if the baby-faced kid filming it
just got out of film school.

Movie babies,
all of us, really.
I don't know what I'm doing
and neither does my father
who's been at his job
for twenty-five years
and counting.

When they knit me
in her womb
they didn't know
what they were doing
with the sperm and such
and neither will I.
I'll fumble my tackle.

Our fibrous cords make no sense
and yet we are strings of human.
But how? People float up from
Bach and Rachmaninov notes
sounding beautifully horrible and frightening
and the like,

stork seeds that are watered by piano notes
of my mother taking lessons
and my kicks punctuating her belly
with each wrong note.

I have read all your
uncommon readerly faces
that I have yet to know
and that are not mine
for who can own a face?

If she ate apple blossoms
her cheeks would turn red
fit to explode.
They were pretty
so she ate them
stamen and pistil and all
and felt bees wanting her,
thrumming around her head.

4 comments:

Ezekiel D. said...

I read this. It made my mind go "whoa."

Grace Halliday said...

you keep getting better and better and better and you're gonna be so good soon that you'll have to move to the moon and be the moon poet and i will miss you if that happens so don't get too good but keep writing because i like to read these stories that you create in fantastic rhythm and images that make see things. in a good way.

Grace Halliday said...

that should be, "...make ME see things..."


LOL.

nate said...

laura -

the imagery of this smacks me in the gut, especially the first stanza. but it does feel kind of like there are a couple of poems buried here, each one its own and incomplete in its being tied to the other subject. perhaps companion poems are in order? the birth/living and the letters/protagonist both seem to pull in different but equally compelling directions. hope this doesn't seem picky.