Fata Morgana: Poems

A Handful of Sand

A Handful of Sand I’m always putting things in poems where I think they’ll keep, lying to the lying gods to make a way out of whatever ways I have. The rooms we wander through on a day of no significance are white, are beige, are gray, nothing of any importance will happen today. A fake fragment of Greek frieze frames three plaster women in pleated chitons sitting on a bus, or so it looks from here, a krater holds a plastic plant (saw palmetto, perhaps) that’s following them, but they don’t seem to be moved. Graffiti on the men’s room stall reads “TEXT,” reads “SIGN,” and also the word “DEUCE” scratched into green-painted metal. Think of all the blunder and fault in the world, a noisy lexicon of mistake, hoots, jargles, squawks, and rasps, think of all the bending and the breaking of oak boughs. Think of the quartz beach wrecked by recent hurricanes, driftwood and seaweed beginning to stink, plastic cup lids I mistook for shells. (We have seen the wind by what it leaves behind, its wreckage 86 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 86 and detritus, but the water won’t be wounded.) File this pearl-smooth conch interior under no, press it against your ear as if it were the spirit radio, and you were walking down the street tuned to just one voice, wading waist-high through shallow light. The minutes continue their shine, the shapes of color change and turn; a wind blows through my skin and you renew the weather. I will not entirely die. 87 Shepherd PG:Layout 1 12/20/06 5:27 PM Page 87 ...