RED POPPIES
for
Dave Hanson, painter
The cats lick red currant
jam
from a Delft garden of
breakfast plates,
bright poppies bleed beneath
tulip tongues.
Seeking freedom of the
street, silly creatures
lavish more lives off
balconies—fallen angels
catapulting toward a
dazzling span of birds.
Sentenced behind white
walls, I am jailer & judge.
Imprisoned by the small
accusations of rain,
they’re galloping nightmares
in search of wings.
On a rumpled spine and ridge
of rug, damp offering
underfoot—leaf litter
dragged in by the tail—
I erode their landscape with
a compulsion for order.
Alít retrieves crumpled paper, playing catch
and mouse with words I
cannot return to, nor answer
her queries so carefully
uttered in the tongue of cat.
Worn to a shadow
scrutinizing closet corners,
Isis prowls the darkness for the lost pieces of Osiris,
meows at the door, knows the
missing piece is in the street.
Alít curls, comma-hard, to sleep harder still
into the action of verb, as
if shelter of rib and arm
held a consummate clause of
breath and repose.
Clasping paws to head in a
Gordian knot,
she’s a glottal stop at the
end of a sentence,
purring a closed “O” to the
sins of the street
Where fragile poppies bleed
into canals reflecting
a veneration of church
spires injecting
a venial anodyne well below
waterline.
24 July 1996
Amsterdam
rev. 2/2001
rev. 2/2001
2001 Fourteen Hills
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