ohn Carle - Two Poems

---

Symbols, Morning


It begins like this, the wet slap
of the newspaper on the door
at 5 a.m.  Your body moves
in dreams, the curve of your back

in light from the street.
Last night we visited a friend,
back from Paris with stories
of cheap market wine and the catacombs

so now you are dreaming of Paris,
how beautiful you would look dressed
in black among the flagstones
of the hipper districts.  We will go,

before children.  If we were already there
you would not need me here on a Thursday morning
bastarding poems from old magazines.
If this were already the world

you wanted you would not have needed
your own body in the kitchen yesterday,
carving the smooth epiphany of a tomato
to drop its hard seeds to the earth,

soil in your hands for days and rain
in your hair.  Sometimes at this hour
I think it could be enough to hear
your first waking breath moving,

ascendent, beneath your skin.  By this
I mean that I am swimming the difficult
poetry of your sex, the words that catch
in my teeth come down from the dark, wet sky

like a kind of grace.  This is enough.
This is not Paris, but only me here
before sunrise and the coffee ready, and your dreams
of Paris, and children, and desire; but if,

waking, you find these poems about dreams
among the pages of the morning paper,
there are coffee stains on the best ones
so you know.

The Man from Española Finally Gets His Burial


From a lectern someone is saying that all good poetry
is about loss.  Wake up.  Sit up straight.
What's that?  I don't trust what I know of loss
at 27 - listen, I was born eleven months after Tet,
twelve years before John Lennon died,
Do you understand this?

While I'm writing this, someone is trying to figure
how to get an airliner from the muck of a swamp;
a cargo ship carrying war refugees wants to land
its dying, human weight on an overcrowded shore;
the sun burns closer to nothingness.  A poet I admire
says that poetry is the light through which
mountains sing to each other at dusk, but the last time
I was in Española all I heard
was the sound of hands throwing santuario walls
erect again after rain.  Anyway, Orlando,
we lit candles after you cocked a .357 to your head
so maybe the analogy of light still works but the man on stage
won't shut up for even a second to let me
find my way to the door.