Where In this cicada city, we are dead,
We are quiet, we are home.
Here, you belong
To me. I, to you. The trees lurch
Toward later summer, reach
Toward the window
Where glass makes a mirror
Of the sitting. Lightning forks.
All directions lead to my empty head
Bent over a box of cicatrix ash.
My mothering lips are stitched
Shut by sorrow.
What was once a mind
Is pried open.
Look, doctor, at the tangle
Of synapse
Where the pearl should be.
And then, distraction —
The pink Mobius Strip dips down
And begins its torturous twist.
The current catches
The tree and drags me forward
Toward some mute missing beginning.
Mary Jo Bang***************
Mary Jo Bang is the author of Apology for Want and poetry coeditor of Boston Review. She is on the permanent faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in New American Writing, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Her collection Louise In Love is forthcoming from Grove Press in January 2001; University of Georgia Press will publish The Downstream Extremity of the Isle of Swans in the spring of 2001.
***************
RL
If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...
if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul