Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

River Stones

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I would like to pick up river stones
and find your likeness in them:
worn smooth, multicolored, still
glistening with cold water.

     But you are not like river stones.
You are like stones before the river has
worn them: rough-spurred and chalky,
your colors hidden under yourself, dry
and thirsting for cold water.

One stone is not better than the other.
One is beautiful for the colors erosion
has coaxed out of it. The other,
because it thirsts to be weathered.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Poetic Forms

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You have asked me to recite you poems
but why dwell on poems past?
I would rather undress you,
close my eyes and let my hands
find the poems your body hides:
your shoulder’s sonnet,
clavicle clerihew, haiku hip,
pantoums in the palms of your hands,
limericks that lick your lips,
ballad and villanelle of breast and vulva,
free verse fingers roaming.

Your body speaks enough poetry
for the both of us.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Night

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Night unzips a black dress,
reveals the thousand
thousand freckles
brilliant on her back.

How long have small astronomers
studied these curves and parabolae?
Look for the hunters and heroes
drawing back their arrows
upon her shoulderblades,
look for lion and lyre,
look for Cassiopeia queen
and Cygnus swan

look for the favorites asleep
beneath Night’s breast:
Alpheratz and Procyon,
Regulus and Rigel,
Aldebaran, Sirius,
the wild wolf of Sirius,
look for countless other
unnamed children aglow
and clinging to
the hip of Mother Night.

How many hidden worlds
does this celestial body
carry on the black pores
of her flesh? How many
civilizations?

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Monster

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You spread dry monsters on the pale flowers:
cracked tentacles, calcified fangs, horns
and hides and pelts of hounds of hell and
Artemisian golden hinds, lined up beside
blinded cooling cyclops;
Viper-tressed gorgons beheaded
and bagged, Scylla’s necks dragged out
of her crags and splayed against sprays
of heather and thyme, junebugs lapping
the sea-salt slime still damp on her teeth.
Herculean thief, even wildflower dusk
won’t mourn the husks you’ve laid out
against sprays of heather and thyme.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Mouse Heart

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In the dark, when I cannot see the shape
of your body, you seem even smaller than your
smallness; you are still trembling, the little
needles of your fingernails burrowed
into my arm.

This is my favorite moment:
curled against you, my ear against your back,
I am listening to the rapid patter
of your small mouse heart,
to the quick mouse breaths
you are breathing.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Merchantman

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She places her hand on the table,
fingers splayed, and I am tracing
the shape of her hand with
my fingertip, as if it were a merchantman
navigating the harbors and bays
of a peninsular quintet:
where shall I berth? The cape of her
index, the horn of her thumb, the
shore of her slender wrist?

I am a lost captain wandering
from one ivory cliff-shelf to the next.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Broken People and Whole

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Your mother wrung her hands
at the kitchen table, said,
Honey, you ought not keep that retard baby.

Your doctor frowned at his clipboard,
flipped papers to avoid your eyes, said
In all likelihood, he’s never gonna talk. I’m sorry.

Your husband slammed the storm door, said
I ain’t signed up to raise no freak,
and you’ve never seen him since.
Never wanted to.

Thirty years later,
your son grins at you,
gap-toothed,
after singing in the Easter choir.

His knob-knuckled hands flutter,
grasping at spasms of joy,
and you can’t help but think
that the best he can do,
little as it may be,
is more effort of love
than those unfaithful people
could muster up for him.

Fuck what broken people say
about what a whole child can be.

Fuck what broken people say
about people they think are broken.

This poem was originally published under the pen name Gabriel Gadfly.

Grace Meditation

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Here is grace:
Calm in the earthquake.
Sway when the earth shudders.
Release your pain,
let it seep from your pores
pour from your fingertips,
and stand in the rain,
and wash your pain
into the shuddering earth.

Here is grace:
Cool in the flames
of your own design.
You are all you choose to be.
You are all you desire.
Kindle your pain fire
with dry-plucked reeds
and warm the seeds
you planted in the shuddering earth.

Here is grace:
Breath in the stifle.
The gentle release of lungs filled
with pain charged with hope.
Rustle the stems,
motion releases transformation:
pain seed flower air,
a gift of grace and care
from and to the shuddering earth.

Imaginary

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This morning, the sun on the porch
is just the cool side of warm,

and the little hula girl on the patio table
drinks light and shimmies her toy hips
while the crows bicker about us,
while the cats curl through our legs
and I tell you about yellow ginko leaves
and why they remind me of you.

You aren’t here, not today.
Today, you tell me you are imaginary.
You are a wisp of an image
swaying like the hula girl
in the steam that curls
off my coffee cup,
and vanishes just as quick

but I wish you were.

I imagine the spring light
in your wild hair, the music you make,
the poetry you fill my mouth with,
my fingers and my mouth,
I imagine my mouth
full of yellow ginko, full of your tongue.
If I imagine you
real, would you be real?

Be real, so I can tell you of the poem
I’ve picked out for your hip.
Be real, so I can translate the debate
and bicker of crows to you.
Be real, unbrushed and wild, be real
so when I cease to imagine and start to long,
you are what my fingers can grasp.