Reginald Shepherd, another poem

from Verse

Reginald Shepherd

One of Their Gods

Was he lightning poured from a smashed flute,
music carved from someone's bones
I know? Qualities absently enter his mouth
where spring and snow are the same, song
-bred, sound-led: frozen in parenthesis.

Warped windows ripple like light
snow (grayed pane a single plane
waves past, wet leaves meander
winter winds), the curtness of his lyric
body, male odalisque with unlit

cigarette: in danger all the time, in winter
falling ice, in summer falling safety
glass, blue-smoke-flowering stars
uncounted as of yet, some illion or another
night obscured by streetlights, head

-lights, an oceanic black with islands
in it, incursions of opaque color
at patterned intervals, contingencies
of trees and buildings blinking out. Club
-headed weeds, wet pebbles, my beloved

is white and muddy: these tattered
bodies sheeted in news as if it were
sleep rub off on the hands,
flowerboats spilled of all cargo.
He will scatter on black waters.