Two poems
MAP OF THE BLUE BLUE BLUE
I have a blue sliver of hot aluminum.
I have a hot blue sliver in my middle finger.
Just below my knuckle I have a flash
of blue glinting as though the weather
were fairer than the fluorescent light
of my basement, warmer than the terrible
voice mail I have informing me
of the latest sighting. You’re back in town
and your drunken face is all sunken in.
I have a sister who warns me of you.
I love my sister who hates the smell
of your lies and thieving as much as I do.
I have taken a year to take inventory.
What I have left I have bolted to the floor,
except this sliver of blue aluminum infecting
my middle finger. I have a workshop
in my basement and a father who taught me
how to design, fabricate, and assemble
a precision machine. I cut and mill
and turn and drill. Soon I will complete
the Blue Machine to protect us from you.
My middle finger finesses my micrometer,
it adjusts the tooling when the dimensions
from the blue print slip out of tolerance.
My middle finger is primary as the sliver
and grows bluer because I strangle it
with a silvery blue ribbon, all nice and curled
at its ends. Here, have it and keep it
forever. The rest, everything else you see,
is for me. But my blue, it gleams for you.
MAP TEARING INSIDE A TORNADO
into the warming arctic, my every
bit of plastic particulate swirls
in the North Pacific, my gulf’s green
suffocates on the dark-slicked banks—
A power line whips the sidewalk
but the images stay up on my screen
shaking so much it’s going to shatter.
The devices stop communicating.
A muscle car calendar scatters from a patio
and the pages catch in the maple
with the wail of the sirens.
The thinnest diseased limb snags me,
I won’t decompose.
The flash flood through the side yard
is white noise at my knees,
I will go on to poison even stardust.
I am one hundred ninety pounds
of preservatives, antibiotics, and caffeine
rain-soaked and panicking for shelter.
I was too late to board the doors, I forget
the warning and press my chest
against both sides of the picture window.
My last locatable belief was in the shift
from weird grey to the lightness
of a pickup truck, now all I know is
I would bury this berserk wind
and collect the neon Chemlawn clippings
blowing through the blown out
cellar window, my next spring
gone well before the first snow—
My affinity for unseasonable weather
cools. I collect and count the wet blades
and strip away the pesticides
with my teeth. O my polar ice cap
creeping toward a lower river, O
my crowning ozone a hundred tons
of satellite wreckage crashes through,
O my beloved house whose roof
ripped clean off takes out the pages
but not the siren in the maple.
My roof takes off the top of the maple.