TWO POEMS
Leslie Singleton
The Bird Heart
It must be a shadow in the oil spill: the blue- black hue of bruise: a winter river floating fallen bark: line and tackle debris. Its singed song makes a star crackle: ember spit from the fire: static on a line. Smoke signals coalesce rise like O's slow in heavy air. In the backyard of my childhood doves fall fracture the stone day. The quail rattle in crates. Bugs hum and fry on an electric light. Murderer or man my father foreshadows as he walks constructs a small offering lays his things before me in sleep not dead not living already a ghost. This blue is too bright I tell him when his eyes two injuries look at me. Cuts split the brown skin wounds where he sees. The cavernous hillside breathes. It is a blanket filled with wind. Behind him the basement house still half- finished, half- fallen in the clay gut. There is only one landscape strewn with broken parts: the shed skin of a copperhead: several feet of forgotten rope: the flaking white picnic table littered with remnants: cigarettes reduced to ash: empty cans: shotgun shells: the bell a goat wore: coyote's teeth. The target a mock deer is stuck with arrows: makeshift five gallon bucket seats circle the fire pit: the rusted hull of an '85 Ford tires long stolen is lost in a sea of grass. I remember the ruddy mound ripe with dewberries: the quiet dream of nesting in its middle buried beneath the blood dirt: the roof its choirs of pine ringing the dark: the green gold weeds arrows to the sky.
It's Not Uncanny How He Got In
The house door hanging by one hinge, a vile creak escaping in the wind. He just blew right in. It's the shape he took: eyes glinting with a hard insistence: love me, wait, not so fast. Lies and glass, feigned kindness of the most heartbreaking variety. Uncanny. The cat's cry should have been an omen: crop circles stained the fields, cigarette burns branded the skin. Even the sky was off: wrong color, wrong distance from the ground. His skin left the sheets too cologne sweet, his tongue's tobacco mint permeated my sleep. Still I pretended to fix the door, forgot to lock its knob. Or I latched the lock and left the window raised. It was I who let him in, often feeding him the sweet milk, sour on his tongue, his mane lapping up my hands' affections. How vain. How sudden one can seem strange, reveal what drains color from a face. How quick the river bends to reveal a sea populated with the debris of our imaginings. He described his own dreams as pervaded by tornadoes, cyclones twirling in the periphery, away from the dream's subject. The dream's subject is loneliness. A lasso roping air.