RICH IVES

Transitional

 

1.

Whose purpose can be

everything that starts without light?

 

Before thorn day,

a snoutfull of smoke,

unlimited climbing,

oh angel of bounty, angel of

 

impatient stubborn excess––

 

wheat and twilight in the golden morning

confuse clouds

 

the way a bird will dream

only of a bird

though it walks

 

on the earth and refuses to fly.

 

 

2.

Some conversations contain men, but none

holds a woman without

another woman,

 

angel of tree limbs, angel

of clouds between.

Tiny feathered women

in skull caps discuss my birdfeeder and

 

probably me, whose forgetfulness feeds rumor, whose

ignorance of weather contains

a kind of welcoming emptiness.

 

A single gesture nearly explains yesterday.

 

 

3.

Wheat and falling darkness

fall no farther than

 

the mistakes of remainders––

angel of thorns, angel

of sudden exits, angel

 

of dark fires, angel of escaping breath.

 

Some deaths contain young men,

but none holds itself to its compliment

without women––

 

which touches and lives alone.

 

 

4.

Getting on the little scream boat through a wound,

you need no voice, merely

intensity.

 

Spilling the anguished milk creates

no echo, no Tomorrow

I’m going to understand this––

 

an anchoring stalk beneath the waves

that could hold up nothing

without water.

 

 

5.

No one I had been before this

had misbehaved so beautifully––

the way rain smells old

 

just before it arrives and changes everything.

 

 

 

 

Intentional

 

My father raised chickens
and often in the gloaming,
my friends, who believed
my father was God,
would chase them
with pebbles and rubber bands,
for we were young and wise,

and sometimes
we chased them to the edge
of the clearing beneath the trees
where the lovers squirmed
beneath the weight of their responsibilities,

and we watched them silently and went home,
and it made us sad to leave them alone with their bodies.

*     *     *

My father was righteous.
I had to refuse my own beard.

I was not a king. I was not meant
to turn away my several bastards.

I was angry and impatient.
It was summer and fireworks bloomed.
I gave a brilliant bouquet to my friends,
who skipped and danced like the chickens,
who didn’t share my unworldly fervor.

And I was perplexed, so
I went to the source of all life,
where it took the form of a pond,
and I just sat there,
receiving.

And my father came unto me,
and my father chastised me
for what I had brought among
his followers, who were called
Neighbors, and I said to my father,

Shucks, Pa, I only wanted to blow stuff up.

And my father did not understand me,
so I said to him,

We die a hundred times each day we live.
Someday we’ll stop dying.

And I left the pond, and went to do
what I had set out to do,
though I did not yet know what that was.

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