NEW! Two poems by Rob Cook

Rob Cook

Two poems

TENEMENT SCENE 

When the tenement loses 

its place in the light, 

thirty pigeons bleed 

from the gray brick sky

where crowded bedrooms dwell.

Fat with plague 

and sidewalk plumage

the pigeons descend as a single shroud

and peck at the cement 

like starving asphodels. 

And the people, always talking,

always feeding their obedient phones

and ignoring their outdated dogs,

scatter like the scattered 

seedlings of a colossus that fell. 

A TRILOBITE PREPARING FOR ITS BIRTHDAY

Dear trilobite and all your advancing crayon
mammals, it is never night.
The sunlight is just broken
or hunted down or self-conscious
from the way its turtles twitch like sea lungs.

The dinosaurs, made from shelves
of shale, have just led the world
to a different room of oranges and wind
and everything the trees and hills can see,
everything the mountains shy with stone can see.

And even though the rabbit-shaped kings cannot play
and the tomatoes cannot play, nor the leaves,
and the faces seem scary in the sky today,
it is not raining—

it’s just your shirt stripes
mining the cephalon forests of a mirror
when it’s closest to the happiness 
stolen from your toothpaste shades of sky,
that bedtime era.

And there the frowns 
from a more slight and missing day
become bright listening for your trails 
through fossil ranges of salamander and cynodont
and a pre-school apricot nephew. 

With a clown’s twelve giggling fingers,
you hunt the sugared cliffs of a cake
for a brachiopod’s grandmother
and a Norian granddad, both still 
next to the sounds a rock made
back in the mythological light.

And still tall with miles and stories
and hugs of dandelion worlds,
they bring five windswept candles,
five hives of ice cream,
five soda bottle amphibians
and hold your newly sprouted hand, 
its house and the little way it laughs

without windows on a Silurian, birthday afternoon.