A Perhaps Line. Gary D. Swaim
and dull victim, Scaramouche, swirls his body about.
A fearsome panache, plunging a glistening blade into a Punch-like
enemy unknown to him. Scaramouche then laughs his laugh saying,
“The world is mad.”
It is mad, in places little known to skilled geographers, and here, too,
we play our little games of territory: “This part of the box is mine,
the much smaller part, yours.” And we laugh.
Colors
Lighting on bright thistles, aster, and joe-pye weed,
a diminutive Painted Lady thrust an even brasher color
on her world. A flash of orange against prickly reds and
purples.
Morning incandescence unmatched at the sun’s rising.
Though it’s flamboyant orange you first see, mistaking the
black
bruise-looking patches for dark leaves on which she rests,
the light of clearer day shows murky colors with bright—
fearsome beauty.
Someone has said dark stains streaking the butterfly’s wings
come from the male’s violent love making and serve as weights
to keep
his Painted Lady from flying away.
What Night Questions
for Pop, 9/20/05
He breathes complications of night
like a World War I trench veteran,
mustard gas blocking air passages.
He endures inquisitions at the hands
of unknown enemies, my dying father,
while he tries to calm brittle, restless legs.
****
Had you expected to live forever?
No. I thought I’d see the sun
fall just once more into the blue lake
and push concentric circles of light beneath
my feet at the shore.
Why are you frightened?
I feel the pulse in my thinned neck. It pounds
at first, then again and again. I wait for an eruption
in my brain. Then, the pulse falls quiet.
I hear no pulse.
But there is more you are not telling me.
My sons tell me I should not be afraid, that I am
a good man. In the middle of the night, I am not
sure.
****
He drags anxious thoughts through labyrinths
of night, weighted packs pulling at him
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