Monday, November 26, 2012

NEW! Three poems by William Cordeiro

William Cordeiro

Three poems


JUST BECAUSE JUST BECAUSE

The day so young 
it rivers with mercy.

Each body mostly water
in a world mostly water

but physics only make me
thirsty.  
   
Look at the sun
skim across the eyes.  

You see, 
even logic’s innocent.

Then why—then why?
Some leak or fibrillation 

of my heart replies,
amid a twitchy phosphorescence

whilst squeaky shopping carts turtle down the aisles,
“if only fools were drunk with wishes.”


SHARAWADGI

The landscaper trespasses to the river
gushing brimful of wanderlust and lady
slippers, great alphabet, goosepimpled
with a million golden bees, as daylight’s
dizzy sting keeps dazzling the naked eye:
from crown to soles, flaunt overflowing 
round each glitch, the heart’s ski lifted 
up a steep, a-dangle in the glitter over clastic 
rock and vatic air, before it’s gentled down 
a bank; meanwhile inside, his quick caged motor-
cycle gyroscopes as if he’d just been given 
tenure. Afterward, a volunteer, he’d tottle
back to wavy shelves or some faux waterfall 
to craft dry temporary tracks through pebbles,
twist bonsai into stunted runts and palps,
raking level mulch chips over little bird skulls 
into vegetative fables, sheering and tweaking
moss, or, garroting in hand another cranky 
leaf-blower, give one good tug to whoosh
dead mush into new monuments of gold 
amid a smoother hobble of the earth, that 
fund he trusts he could not but inherit. 


SUSPENDED ANIMATION

The sidewalks gridlock with their litter’s drift. 
Like oil slicks, the sunlight shocks and riddles

to crevice glare down every street; gray sky’s 
bloodshot. Over blank brick roofs, one flock 

zigzags. Flak of scattered pigeons hang on fire 
escapes. All Brooklyn’s mesmerized and blown

down turns of stale obstructed zones, a range
of snaggletooth cranes. Beyond a broken half-

hearted barrier: a muddy ditch, planks, links 
of pipe. Gulls pick bedraggled feathers, skip 

or shuffle; loose news-leaf hustles by—daily papers
ruffle a city’s schmutz, a pressed off smudge of ink.

No comments: