CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Three Poems Reginald Shepherd

REMAINDER'S EDGE For Gene Tanta He's sleeplessness pulled through a sieve, snake branch beliefs dangle from, overgrown with flourishing abjections. Glance wears down grass to gravel, lamb to less than sacrifice, night contours weather with its full vocabulary of line. Night and hunting made a pledge to stay the shape of sundriness, waxing lunatic with blood and pride, part of light's rhetoric decayed to prey. (Predictably stained verdigris, the wall of what he was where grass blades cut me green as clinging vines, climbed me verdant with impossibility.) Wind fingered sky to azurite (blue-basic carbonate of copper, a semi-precious stone derived therefrom), weather wondered how much longer he would wait beneath the abalone shell iridescent against question's kiss, awake to any irony. The ghost is ready but the meat is raw, so many salted handfuls tossed like rain across the shoulder. Downpours of place align the seen, the happiness worn away to damp sidewalks, spring-colored cures for love. He sleeps away each day all night, failed carnivore, blank axiom. THE TENDENCY OF DROPPED OBJECTS TO FALL The air is thick with gods, crowded streets rife with them, an infestation of divinity, "the servant-keeping class." What shape wants them? Memory is money and what wind wants to do with it is scatter. Wind doesn't. Want doesn't. Assembles the materials for bodies drifting through the past on rubber rafts, with plastic oars they don't know how to use. Blank, wounded, or rendered otherwise helpless. Justice admires John but never tells him so (better to break than to be broken), establishing a proper format for suffering. So many laborers have elapsed, "the torturable classes" singing Deus. Singing Without money we'll all die. They've all died. History leaves no witnesses, a when and why, a where and what became of them. In exile Andromache's handmaid builds a miniature Troy with toothpicks and superglue, with matchsticks from a story that she read. A useless brilliant thing with tinfoil walls and someone rolls over it in his sleep. The notes read that is Not loved, or I shall totally remove. Or Be wealthy, that is Not my people. With us. I was. In me. Draw near. Head bowed, still thinking and. WATER IS A MUSEUM Broke the glass and cut my hand again, the water looks like shards churned up, not enough in the world to come clean, wash my hands of me. Here comes the blood, lukewarm, dilute, and insufficient: contaminated anyway. So let the water overtake myself, so let me disappear in drown; I heard the sibyl said I want to die. After a lost squall, sea sung slowly wrong, the poisoned moon goes gray, standing at the threshold of whiteness, witness: even the purest winter sullies me, clouded over with denial. And the others more sure of salvation, salve on the ragged wound? They watch while I am leaked ashore with faces of wonder why and what I must have done. Blood seeps into the dirty sand of personhood and paints it black, my song gone wrong again, capsized, toxic by-product of me. They say I made myself my fate, and make it sad; concern evaporates like morning mist. Whatever is a hand must want to harvest me, thresh me grain-like, husk crumbled small enough to fertilize its fields of virtue, sheer virginity, if there should come to be some water. I might have been a somewhere, I might be something you need to destroy.