Issue 15, January/February 1998
Gerard Wozek - Two Poems

black ink sky
and desert mist
shrouds the tracks
left my pythons and wolves 
the silk fog falls over skin
grazing your hair and shut eyes
and blanketing your fist
uncurling in sleep

no phantom or memory
untwines you from the pull of grace
no coyote tracks your scent
as you rise in the still morning
to the faintest edge of a new moon
hanging like a comb for the stars
or the arrowless cradle
of an archer's bow

don't mistake that churlish grin
for anything but deceit
I am the sullen gait of the club foot
and the drool of the harelip
I am sole attendant to pity's flower
and the rant of the asylum dweller
I keep company with the Forlorn, the Perverse,
the chattering Ishkabibble on street corners
I make couplets from the petitions 
of encarcerated madmen

all day I fidget in airless cellars where hay rots
wondering, why have I dreamt this into being

patron to the Troubled Heart
braid of the indigent
when will the Open Palm lay a rosary of kisses
around my neck
all I want is to reel in drunken raptures
store up Valentines and the dust 
that drifts off of moth wings
buoy up the planets with diaphonous odes

whoever passed on this heritage 
of the starved for touch hollowness
the straining to hear the soul core's koan
let it end with me now

I wait for the gentle bruja
who will sift out my belly-stuck grief
and tell me this strange birthmark is a gift

take my hand
and feast on the sweet leftovers with me