HEAVEN ON THE BEAST 

On islands more solitary
than the most distant star
a summer heat descends on a still, starry
sky that maps the immutable outlines

of two iguanas. One, the smaller, sits deadly
on the other’s back: its Capricorn no match
for the seated Pegasus beneath. In their hides
one finds Canis Major, Libra, Scorpio, and Hercules;

as others extend around the rumpled neck, the horned
brow. Whole generations could have taught themselves
on the backs of these Iguanas. The Moon’s surface
has always been readily available; nebulas are black holes

neatly pinned in place. And they have given size
to our most jumbled maps, sit long enough
to confound our distant gaze.

When the universe comes in the shape of iguanas
there’s no telling what might be hiding
in their mouths, what invisible hearts
keep the map standing, warm but deadly still
under a setting star.

first appeared in Xanadu

THE FIFTH DAY 

The first day
was the first hour.

The second hour
we toured a landscape
that had taken years away from us.

(Somewhere in this world,
we must have thought, stands
the record of our past.)

On the second day we laughed
and stopped to ask the sheep
where lay our direction.

(Driving still further into scenes
we pretended not to know—)

And then time drained out
of us. All but this was
illusion: the fourth day.

(Events ordered themselves
behind our backs, and the order
meant nothing.)

And there was nothing to learn,
nothing to hear,
no one deserving an answer.

It was the fifth day,
the fifth year, five hundred
days and years, when we awoke
from near-sleep. We both
became shadows at the window
and wished for nothing
but the breaking crystal
of a distant stream.

 
THE PURPLE HEART

Is something she put away in a drawer
in the back room down the cellar
along with a full service of silver-plated
flatware, afghan rack, kitchen cabinets

removed when she was still young,
Uncle Tony’s soap, clothes pins, and rags
and rags and rags.

At night
she cleaned; she cleaned during
the day, the day before Christmas,
Holy Saturday, never Good Friday.

She dusted pictures of her children,
three daughters shot with fake pearls,
a brown velvet shoulder wrap, poodle
‘dos, and smiles that bled through

her most sleepless nights.
So much she had tucked away,
cleaned out of sight, like the colors
her heart had once worn:

pink for a rosy baby,
gray when it passed away

to the place where all lost things
go: purple hearts, aging hearts,
hearts that had once worn faux pearls
but now dress themselves in invisible

black: a color that can not
be cleaned away, a heart she must wear
in a tin ribcage, dark as a drawer
in her artfully-forgotten cellar.

first appeared in Louisiana Literature