Costel Iarca © 2008 All Rights Reserved
Costel Iarca © 2008 All Rights Reserved
from Portraits of Mary
xviii.
April is being delivered by the knife, plasma
dripping from the birches. Mary, the tulip trees
are as restless as hell-folk. Today sweet-talk and green
are like acid in my intestines. The comfort you create
wrangles me—I am, I suppose, in love with barbs
and brambles. I’m sick of spackling, staving off
the inevitable. Light bulbs, groceries, furniture,
trash-day, bill-day, the whirling door of consumption.
Must we feng shui every room, eliminate all traces
of entropy and disrepair? Odd, I suppose, but I can’t
bloom in a place where nothing is broken. I bumble
in paradise, despondent in the face of rectitude. Mary,
there’s this siren in the wasteland; she sings to me.
xix.
Mary in the new garden, sporting a shovel and a weed.
June 1. God bless this blur. Evergreens genuflect;
the hyacinth considers us kin. Ginger smiles at our feet.
Darkness picks its teeth, savoring the last morsels of light.
Hours swirl about us. Shadow is marrow in the bones
of our story. How soon we will hear footsteps on the driveway,
knocking on the door of breath, our vegetable love
swallowed by sky. The fist in my gut blossoms a hundred
weeping violets. Mary naked in the doorway. Mary folding
sweaters in the kitchen. Mary meditating. Mary modeling
a green belt. Each image is somehow epic, a mandala
at the turnstile of oblivion. Mary laughing on the patio—
spider webs in her hair, red dirt on her Danskos. Thunder.
John Amen is the author of two collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer and More of Me Disappears, and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire. Further information is available on his website: www.johnamen.com. Amen founded and continues to edit Pedestal Magazine.