Tell Me What I Hear Through A Telescope The Wrong Way

D. C. Reid
From:   Open 24 Hours. Fredericton, NB: Broken Jaw Press, 1997.

Here I open my eyes on the day you do not come home.
Now it is winter, and my washed hand smokes in the winter air.

This would be the place obligation and desire have no quarrel,
the calm of a leathery sea. 16 years after you crossed over
             into this world.

                                         The curtain flutters as though dropped
             through the fingers of someone not there, Elvis Presly perhaps,
         with those spaghetti legs and gold trousers, unquellable nigger legs

on a white boy, his never-again drips of hair another era away.
                                                    A stylus skips in an unimportant
              corner of my thoughts:

here I convince myself of hope      —      crazy, and complete, and all:

             I think I hear my daughter                take my heart
                                              with a smoking hand

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

D. C. Reid's works copyright © to the author.