Friends
friends coming to my room
have smoke in their hair like hot wax
the odor melts from their heads
Someone has burned
old newspapers with the leaves
Outside my window
the wind mixes the paragraphs in a new order
Never read
Dido's wish rises
from this burncan
behind a trailer park in Montana
Aeneas is coming
Aeneas is coming apart at the seams
on the tailor's lap
The load of ancestry
carrying his father from Troy
On my back, too
I struggle for love with this clumsy Trojan
The spinning needle
cannot tighten around one thread of thought
on the subject
To build cities
I have broken stones
tasting their centers with wheels
Looking for water
I have shut out the light--
eating Leviathan with stanchions of meshed fingers
solid in the bedrock
Beneath all this matter of fact
is the broken fire of bridges
Bridges for the traffic of words
threads over the water
separating us like islands
Fire carving up
the back of night
the spine of raw nerves
cold against the walls of the hospital
pale iris leaves
As if somewhere
above the roof will bloom
large purple flowers of smoke
when I come out
When I come out
I return to the bridges
Burning
with the idea that we can be
strangers again
David Swoyer
Contents | Mudlark No. 1
Dying Near Easter, 1969 | The
Beginning of a Frog's Chorus