Candice Ward
Four poems
Run-on Ghazal, Undone
Naturally, you imagine her eyes of some maternal
color
brighter ahead than even gazania as she leaps and
takes
you aback without a glance to keep you in stride,
home
on the run your belvedere, her unexamined assumption
in the face of the tigers always behind, their oral
tradition
chatoyant in the running order where stripes taste
perhaps
blotched: non gazebo, non videbo sums up this
tiffin relation of
savanna ecology — blindness and desire cinquefoiled as
tiger’s-
eye theorizes hunger, the mother of all sandwiches in
which you —
Complementarity
Nothing but glass without me, glass —
a mere self-azured air of sheer grandiosity. Cloudless
your
ass may be, but that’s just good housekeeping
apparently.
Okay, so I make my sky, ammoniac,
from the likes of you — too bad if suicide takes two —
wing and a pane
yes, like
this
just
glass
plus
blue
tat
too
All This, Accursed
a black lab crosses your path
with snow in its mouth
remember?
what gypsy grandmother
filled your hands
with such crystal
as if I die
all this to be
yours?
ouija and tisane
waking at night
the dawn borne in mind
with no din still drives
its blue veins across
the snow like this
signally so
yours
Mise-en-tranche: A tribute song
("I haven’t been this happy / since the end of
World War II."
—
Leonard Cohen, "Waiting for the Miracle")
He loves the country but can’t stand the trees
on the same grounds — real yet not exactly
there, like the World Bank — cypress sheer
madness where the wind has no currency
yet the sentimental willow goes on whining,
meaner than mildew to sour his leisure,
the pleasure of coming into his own silk
lining. Such a stitch to be talking to his
pockets at closing time. Repent, they said,
but now he knows what everybody knows
they meant: the sermon’s on account,
beyond
the mind to credit, like fiat money. It’s
criminal,
reversible as sonata or skin, this torn trenchcoat
indebted to the blues, the rain a rhythm section
tapping panic on his lids. Drum him in then
at the Great Event, with that dove he bought
and bought again. Stranger music, those rivers
going crazy over garbage in the harbor. A body-
bagman that time will not okay, whose workers
in song are still giving tongue just to get ahead
of their class. Billet to the Left Bank when
Manhattan’s given as Japan’s taken, your
man’s
been driven from seven pillars to postmodernism.
What a relief to lie down at last with all he’s
lost,
to kiss off Berlin and its cheap violins now that
he’s
holding every note torn from the sheets he never
worked alone, by the sweat of the moon or a dead
magazine. Let the limousines wait in the street
for last year’s man to comfort any widowed
government. He used to live on loan himself,
at the shore where Malibu verges on absurdity.
But the bonds he bears now he wears as bracelets,
like
a refugee, entrenched in foreign issue. He’s
divested,
optioned, rhapsodic with his treasury of merits —
history’s indulgence a dated unhappiness:
Nancy’s
phone open since ’61, Suzanne sold down the
river
in ’67, Marianne so long gone now with the
famous
raincoat. Will he ever get clear of their .45s and
razor blades, their dresses, their asses? Love
coldly
slipped from hyacinth to barbiturate, verses for
faces
lined and powdered by the bitter mirror: the
river’s
answer, he guesses, to the cut of his coke or his
times.
If there’s hell still to pay for all that croc DNA
once
the fiddler’s stopped fundamentally, he says he
can’t
complain. As beauty’s his witness to the falling
rate
of prime, he’s never been more postwar or felt
so
good since his bird wired cash from Bretton Woods.
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