DAVID DODD LEE publishes Half Moon Chapbooks in Michigan. He is the author of Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 1997) and the forthcoming Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002). Recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Quarterly West and Many Mountains Moving. The Beauty of the Present Tense (Whitefish Bay Cemetery) The dead would like a word with you They've been waiting years cubicles of green grass Surrounded by a white picket fence Richard R. Sutton would like to talk to you: It's nice What you've done with the place, Plastic flowers, the headstones lined In symmetrical rows . . . And the espalier! I wish you could hear the mockingbirds the way I do, The music they make when they gather, the long watery strains like a chorus of cellos. Or how a single bird might separate And make a bridge that sounds like a dulcimer Weeping in the middle of the night. * The nearby stink of cows in the air A long time reading between sun and cold willows Buckets and buckets of bright milk Burning Leaves (Brandywine Lake) And I think, after I open my eyes to the morning's pale Shadows, I understand the labyrinthine Blood laughing At the room standing upside down One millisecond Before consciousness blots out the indescribable beyond Then the countless leaves. A windbreaker (white with a blue lining) A melody, the words of which have disappeared You know, don't you You even thought to say so once, and turned it around in your mind Then kept it Summer I still remember them. How their hair drifts toward the top of the water, eyes half-open. Shining like paint, like the wedge of an apple. Like a gestural splash of light, A chinook salmon Emerging not ten feet from the boat. Sometimes I imagine spring poking lime-green shoots Through those dead boy's ribs . . . Spiders turning to dust inside their webs. A woman Begins to move Beneath me, groaning like a swingset made of wood. The Wedge In a wide, white room, I've been refusing to cooperate. It's true. But yesterday, Monday, I spent the morning logging in deer-kill data at the fish hatchery. A single orange leaf floating over the blue pond . . . A little fur the color of rust Coming away bright on my fingers – the animals’ lips pried Making them look as if they may begin screaming. |