Two Poems
Mark DuCharme
Root
Nothing there is that doesn’t quiver
We now must think as birds
In permanent rainy weather
Which the idioms of speech will not convey
Birds think in fidgets, quick as weather
Birds splice tongues of rotten fruit
To trees’ flesh to be etched against
Blank skies’ wideness, ’til wicked tongues are formed
Speech is another matter. It
Is song failed by parts of grief
By the unflinching, filthy stares of huntsmen
Lacking summers to believe
If I believed, or am not whole
In a dead man’s overcoat—will June release
Me in traffic of dark days
Deader than spiders underfoot
Yet if I live, will I dream like birds
& Take up their wicked cries
Impermanent as the sand that scuffs my boots—
As feral night-idioms where poems take root
Interiors
Winter doesn’t dream itself
It moves variably in cold bright light
Among harbors which dither
With rogues in gold weather
Amid whose songs we grew yet weren’t afraid
Or if we were, it was of weather
It collects guises in its dream of rogue gardens
It reads the Norton Anthology like a script
That cannot be dignified with breath
It reaches for frost when it weeps
& When it does, I have to sniff
Out the radiance from a tuba or brouhaha
To indulge the flowers of a world that has not borne me
To any height from which I soon might fall
When the weather fears itself. Not now
There is a statue of the rain that changes face & drops
I clip it for the vigor of its bronze disappointment
I groom it for bragging altitude
If I am there at all, I am sometimes near it
Waiting to brush against a red fire engine
Or crook my arm against a lost saint’s thigh
That I never do encounter
Don’t mire yourself in the weight of dead sparrows
Spin the moon when you’re not near it
Until all the weeping alums grow up & bloat
A shattered portion of the night to not take seed
Mark DuCharme is the author of We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, Counter Fluencies 1-20, The Unfinished: Books I-VI, Answer and other works. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.