......................................................................................................................................................
The Poetry Of
Karen Corcoran
..................
Dabkowski.........................
The Bad Daughter
He lays
on a hill over
looking the city, just like
the Stage Manager
narrator
of 'Our Town', but he never
speaks. His words
are in
my head, my knees are never
kneeling
there, placing flowers
at the headstone-- he's
not dead
to me. I will not have each
red geranium
saying, death death death, nor will I
picture him
as powdered, me bending in
to part his hair
the way
he wore it
when alive.
I look in the mirror
and see those errant locks, the
rounded nose, the pitch black eyes-- he is
alive
if I don't visit
his bones-- alive and quite at home
inside
of me.
grim reapings
one minute they're
swimming around the tank
and then they're
limp
afloat on sides
capsized canoes
and there's something
else
there is a light that's gone
scales working catching silver
and it's vanished as a moonbeam on a lake
death takes
the heat
out
robs the light and many times
I've seen a husband or a wife
lean into a casket for goodby and I know the line's
been cut for good
there is a
creepiness
in talking to a suit
or dress in an oblong box it mocks
the reality
of the laughter and the longing
shared
the fights fought
in spectacular livid color
and the tears the sex all things absorbed
in the hex of grim mortality
takes what's naked
in their faces
slips a photo in instead dead is dead the very second it climbs into
the fish the birds the men have not a minute left in skin
when it heaves in snaps off the light
puts the grimace
in a sack
as it makes off
with you
to maybe
another place
maybe
there's
no place but you're
done with this
one
there's no sense in getting dressed up
or siphoned out when fire
is what is needed pyre and prayers
a little dancing
some
of the sillier stories
told
so those who love you
see you walking through and giving it
a last and bastard's glance
you
we
all of us
the souls who never owned
a single thing
except
our
shadows
A Poem Where
The Words Are Mostly Made Up
But The Meaning Is Not
Gutterhollow roll of the last of the day
when every silence
is permissible,
when words are timberladen thistlebombs
carried on the breath, I am without a cart for dreams.
It seems I've hoboed high this day, and slurred the
razorridges,
blurry as a curd
inside
the whey, and dropped an eiderdown
too soon,
and fleece-eyed, lazy
as a gentleman's
dog
asprall in
help yourself to sun- I've slept the ransom
through. What's left, a G clef
major chord
of whored
remembrance, with hardly a half-donned haversack
to pack it in: a Pilated, hand-washed heliotrope
of shuttered, moping light.
I am a sight
for sorest soul. I am the magpie and the mole, swept up
and gone
to SleepyTown.
