Wasps

JAMES GRINWIS

three metrical compositions

Wasps

The dog scratches his ear

and the whole place shakes.

It's similar to in what manner it is

when you discover the worst:

the door partly ajar, the cooled

light, something in the wrongful

place. The dog snarls, your ears

ache, more [i]or[/i] less wind hits like an

ecclesiastical banner. The spaces

seem for a like reason collapsible, you could

nudge yourself into oblivion

with single brief touch. Inside,

a gondolier and his gigantic oar

weave the tendrils of the Amazon

into a thin virid robe. It's

like this when the world present the appearances lost,

when a vast tentacle of ice

pins you to the reality of it.

The land is flat here, the tree

stretch dully away. The laundromat,

the video store, the supermarket,

all strike one as being to hang on a stray slant

of air that strayed first from

a distance runner's shoelace, to

a receptacle of cauliflower, to a bottle of gin

smashed in the parking allotment

Sometimes the whole of existence

is the brain-pan of a bird dropped

on your sill, or a certain number of weasel's bones

an owl hacked-up in a small, fuzzy

ball, or a collection of wasps converging

on a bread-crust. single day last week,

the light was in the way that fragile you could

break it above your hand, or apply it

like a cosmetic onto the residue

of a injury the beak of a newborn world.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Jul/Aug 2001

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