Dorianne Laux selections for poetry circle


The Last Days of Pompeii

What if the ashes came down on us,
a black avalanche trapping our bodies
in their twenty-first century beds,
your spine buttressed with pillows,
wearing taped-up wire glasses,
an old book cracked open
against the knobs of your knees.
And me curled next to you, one hand
on your chest like a wind-blown
blossom, in socks and a T-shirt, asleep,
just beginning to dream.

Preserved for time without end
this end-of-day tableau, on view
in a glass room in the future’s
museum, two dragonflies sealed
in amber or ice. Or ruined statues,
arms and heads lopped off,
the painstaking calculations
of geometry and physics, reconstructing,
from whorled stumps, our inner lives:

the possum bent on a wet road in the blue
headlights of my dream, the marriage
of our bodies only moments before
the ash rushed in like the sea, sheathing
each small thing in cinders and shadows,
what we gave each other encased
in dust: the ring on the sink, a brass angel
with hammered wings, their meaning
a secret even from us, your eyes
seared blind for eternity, my hair
splayed against pillows of dirt
like a handful of dark straw.



Death Comes To Me Again, A Girl

Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It's not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.


Graveyard at Hurd's Gulch

His grave is strewn with litter again,
crumpled napkins, a plastic spoon, white
styrofoam cup tipped on its side, bright
half-moon of lipstick on the rim.
I want to scold her for the mess she's left,
the flattened grass and squashed grapes,
but I've seen her walking toward the trees,
her hollow body receding, her shadow
following behind. I'm the intruder,
come not to mourn a specific body
but to rest under a tree, my finger tracing
the rows of glowing marble,
the cloud-covered hips of the hills.
I always take the same spot,
next to the sunken stone that says MOTHER,
the carved dates with the little dash between them,
a brief, deep cut, like a metaphor for life.
Does she whisper, I wonder, to the one
she loves, or simply eat and sleep, content
for an hour above the bed of his bones?
I think she brings him oranges and secrets,
her day's torn and intricate lace.
I have no one on this hill to dine with.
I'm blessed. Everyone I love is still alive.
I know there is no God, no afterlife,
but there is this peace, the granite angel
with the moss-covered wings whose face
I have grown to love, her sad smile
like that sadness we feel after sex,
those few delirious hours when we needed nothing
but breath and flesh, after we've flown back
into ourselves, our imperfect heavy bodies,
just before that terrible hunger returns.


Smoke

Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat's eye
in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke,
the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries
of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke
slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked
into the night you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk
and swimming with stars. Somewhere a dumpster
is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine.
All down the block something inside you opens
and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,
trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.
You don't flip on the TV or the radio, what might
muffle the sound of car engines backfiring,
and in the silence between, streetlights twitching
from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp
of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter
as you inhale. There's no music for this scarf
of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers
crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song
light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough,
then thins and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes
the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks,
slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs
its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.
You can hear him weaving his way down the street,
sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth
before swallowing: breath of the cat kicked
to the curb, a woman's sharp gasp, lung-filled wail
of the shaken child. You can't put it out, can't stamp out
the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through
your smallest passages. So you listen and listen
and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace
of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros
and rings, the blue chains linking around your head.
Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke
and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see
where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,
like the ghost the night will become.