Archer’s Son
Ozymandias,
Quicksilver,
Owl’s song,
The Comfort
of Recipes,
Teens talk,
Fireplace
stories,
Cherry red
moon over the trees.
The owl
hoots. Canaries
Fly in the
dusky light.
Below, a
child’s swimming pool.
Sands of
disturbance waking into light.
She opened
the curtain.
Red, cherry
red, cherry cherry red.
Why was the
owl’s song so new?
You came
when I called, but I didn’t call. Candles burning
On the
stove. Oil of cloves. Jack Robinson.
Picture
this: a girl on a swing,
Hair flowing
like wheat. She is my daughter.
Her feet
kick in the air and she rides the calls of birds.
Once, when I
was a gentleman, he said,
I opened the
attic trunk to find my dagger.
Are you
listening? Strains of reeds fly over the hill.
The carnival
arrives marching and tumbling and the girl begs
To see the
stiltwalkers, the tiger, the man on the trapeze.
Fire eaters
stroll into the den, disrupting my hard-earned peace.
They toss
rings, release doves into the rafters,
Vault from
the ceiling beams.
That’s when
the police blow in,
Daggers
cloaked, searching for the peace-disturbing miscreants.
They find me
clutching a desk leg and a table lamp whose stand is covered in gum.
They jostle
me to jail with their billy sticks.
No more of
this, they say. No more reading such profane screeds.
In jail I
pray with an inmate clad in a dotted blouse.
We ask Jesus
to come down to rescue us from laws like stones.
In a barred
window a leprechaun alights,
Small and
dancing. “Jesus sent me,” he says.
“Do you
trust me?”
The woman in
the dotted blouse says yes. I say, “Like I trust tigers,
Like I trust
the scales of fish.”
“Well
enough,” he says. “Jump!”
And when we
do, we’re taken up into the clouds.
