Two Poems

RHINOCERI

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Gerard1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

We can agree there is a time for honesty
and then there is a time for honesty.
This is one of those times. Honestly,

that night on my parents’ roof after
we’d bought the condoms and made
our pacts and you asked if I was ready

I said yes, that I was all yours, but
I didn’t tell you I couldn’t quit thinking of
the National Geographic I’d perused

that morning in the can, the rhinoceri
about to die from drought so I herded them
from Africa into my virginity’s history.

I’ve come to know them as the way
I know something important’s going
to happen, go out the window, or jump a horse.

And again they’re here in this, doing
whatever rhinos do when they aren’t dying.
I’ve burnt up shadows staring into myself,

the sun on the Serengeti. I thought you
a sky alive with birds of paradise, even
when the rhinoceri first came to me and

even when afterward you said I couldn’t love,
not really, because I was only seventeen-
I never was angry for that until yesterday,

drinking on a street café’s deck. I am
sitting with friends, a man and a woman.
Another woman walks up and sits with us.

The new woman offers herself to my friend
who promptly says my other friend is his
girlfriend. The new woman lowers her price.

Bellowing rhinos surround me, rhinos
not dying of drought. The new woman understands
and starts to stand to leave but falls over

drunk in the road. She refuses my hand
to help her up, out of shame, mine or hers,
who knows. The rhinos are here and charging

for the grace a boy in love deserved. Rhinoceri
believe in a golden age for love. The new
woman tells my friends no one can buy

what she saw between them, she’s tried
for years to drink her heart’s lake. I want
to say I scooped her up, a silver stallion

crossing the plain, herding the rhinos, that
there was no time to fashion a saddle
or make declarations in the night,

that we and the rhinos set off for every mirage.
The new woman’s situation made me want
to cry. I am again in the can, reading the walls,

wishing all these names are somewhere
scratching their bellies and backs against rocks and trees.
The rhinos are standing in the rain.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Gerard2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Skin he knows he doesn’t have. Yellow pine
underneath the course grit sandpaper so

three seasons graying will go away layer
by layer until the honey colored inside

becomes the honey colored outside with deep
course grit scratches. He sees the grain,

the pores, the thirsty pine’s cells. Sinew and bone.
The beer he’s drinking. The woman

he doesn’t want to cut her finger or drive a splinter in
when she leans on the railing.

She will place pots here. Red-hot pokers one summer
and basil the next. Yellow pine underneath

the finest grit- More like a fingernail file she uses
readying for Friday. Barbecue waiting for

charcoal and flame. Vodka almost frozen and
lemon wedges cut and wet in the ice chest.

She will lean on the yellow pine railing
against the summer heat pretending her life

is a field just over the one she sees.
The deck is on house’s edge. The railing,

the last stand between salmon dressed with a hint
of citrus and clove waiting for the thin honey glaze

and the far field’s river ripping the world in half.
He has finished the wood so she can white-knuckle

the edge of everything, turn and face him, the hurt
she wants at the day’s end and mostly nothing else.