Bells

in the snow i thought i could hear russian bells,
dissonant, atonal, beckoning for relief
one after the next

i stood still - everything else rushed by, and
i closed my eyes.

what issued forth from the mouth of the bells
were the junkie dreams of tumescent summer:

plowing over a field to lay down seeds, finding
teal diamonds with whole cities inside a grain of sand,
sand blanketing a civilization that relied on brass

i could stand there all day.

or sitting with you on a beach, on the mediterranean,
watching the sun lick the wound of ships on waves,
so far, so much that i see red dots everywhere,
a burned retina,

so violated, i stick a knife into the evermore flagrante delicto, and say,

yes, it has always been what you thought it was,
me and the fire.

the lemon groves, the olive groves,
they all shake in the wind, a denial, a refusal. no, no,
just shivers.

the bells ring and ring. i think i am
pulling the strings, but you know, i can't say
that i know what they're ringing for.

Providence

sometimes, the sun sets earlier
on you, the darkness rising like frozen breathes.

and on each of those hurried, timid nights,
Enola Gay sleeps just fine, with no regrets.
the doing had to be done.
you can make the decision to make
certain, but in the implosion that rises, looking
back would only render you a blind
poet, recounting the feel
of sand melting to glass, a separator that walls
off the past, soon behind you anyway.
you thought you could duck, by being
cheerful, hungry, reticent, but then you knew you only came back
to make sure that what you were about to do
had to be done.

i am not moving. the platform rolls away from me,
the trees take off sprinting towards day.

the narragansett needs saving, a bay of foam,
my dead sailor riding the clipped waves in a pattern, held.
the somersaults he does are a protest
against gravity, which, although he pushed against
his entire life, now pulls him, pulls him. he should have been a pirate,
gotten more out of himself, pearls from the seabed,
wine-truths out of you. but like so much else from those days,
the tide came in and washed it away with hops.

if you knew, if you only knew -

would you not become her servant, brother, friend, Providence?

what appellation shall i use now? a god will do.

then those days could bear to shrink
still. then i have never heard
an organ cry. then the ocean would become a mountain
that i could scale. then you'd still be unwilling, unable.
then danger would say its name aloud.

then i would have the courage to copy
the words you wrote to me. then, then,
there would be no more.

==

Note: "would [you] not become her servant, brother, friend, Providence?" is a deliberate misquote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.