Saturday, March 8, 2014

It's March 8, a Saturday

Here is a poem from The Black Forest that features today's date.


HEART OF 5000 BEAR



No king could break me
with speeches or sweetmeats.
No queen could teach me
how to pray and mean it,
even how to meditate.
Even if she was my mother,
my foot would undulate
like the giant country
all our oceans form,
the horizon outside shrinking
into nervous rhetoric
in solidarity with my interior.
The air turns Slovenian,
the palace smells like cinnamon,
and I’m into it.
As a servant, I understand suburbs:
like mine, their biographies
merely parallel the real story
these wet years write
upon the royal tarmac,
driftwood left behind a fierce storm.
It’s March 8, a Saturday.
I’ve been sleeping in this poem
for several weeks,
a pocket history of neon
tucked inside my jacket,
where hardscrabble frontiers
dissipate into acceptable weather.
In my cat-suit, friend,
I entered manhood
and surveyed all this land

and indeed caused it to be.