Epidemic, and: Apricots, and: Great Joy

Epidemic

Not from your country,
I'm a survivor
of the war in your
countryside. Now I
stand and ask "Do you
want your eggs scrambled?"
when I should be asking
"If we think long and
hard enough about
all the lost blood and
skeletons and talk of
reincarnation,
how can we kneel
on this hard floor, on
our tender kneecaps, to
forgive, among
others, ourselves?"
Is this a poem for
young men who die from
love and the body's
reconciliations?
Or is there a deaf
beast behind this thin field
of sighs who fears us
as much as we ignore him?

Apricots

In your notes you asked for apricots
in the silver dish. I brought you apricots,
crushed, pureed, in the gold decanter.
You wrote they are delicious,

the chilled apricots, jellied, untamed.
I wrote back it is marvelous that you enjoy
and do not fear the full glass
set before you on the bare counter

and that you mention it now
in a fine cursive lacking its usual panic.

Great Joy

And even, at times, great joy,
repeats the trained parakeet.
Somebody please behead the little monster.

- Have you ever met one of those
everchanging persons, a brand new persona
for each half-decade or so, with a reined in

crazy streak, but still so beautiful, so stunning,
you want your friends - your old friends
and your new friends and people you haven't

befriended yet - to meet and know and love her
as you do, fitfully but with no violence?...
"What I hear is the therapy's working,"

said Ivan, and I don't want him carted off
to the gulag for thinking then saying it,
the smiling wincer, the wincing smiler

from the Monday evening group,
because maybe I have settled into the dull logic
of peace and love, finally, just maybe.

- So how do you explain the rage toward
your friend's pet bird as you twirl
his delicious pasta to the profound jazz -

his scraggletopped pupil and mate,
the one he calls forth to be made audible,
unforgettable and even tame

for you and only you to applaud then vanish from.