Alexandria Peary

The Gift

Like a spittle of aluminum, a crest of fear
in a long-faced mirror, like water rushing over a box,
like a dried sentence flying in the air,
like being shown a picture of a perforated wave,
like a mark that appears on each moment,
like knowing a man is in the box,
ingot of man, and the water is shiny, highly intuitive.

Like a mote dripping with silver,
a cataract painted with lead, a sentence of gleam
and the sky speeded up, cloudy, obscure, occluded, unheard of
using a cat’s eye for a planet,
like the water now almost reaching
the help desk across the marbled floor
of the enormous lobby of the hospital.
The sculpture, a prototype, donated by the major
auto-pharmaceutical industries, Spanish moss fills the ceiling
  in the car port, vaults rush past picking up no one
  and souls like aphids stream the stalks of the escalator.

In this gift—a sheen, a shining—wrapped around
  a grid of major research hospitals in one block,
on an acre with a drop-away floor,
the mesh bow, car-sized, is heavier than it looks.
Shreds of people, the day torn off, and the incinerator is working.
Oh, dollop of man. Replica of Rodin’s thinker from the gift shop,
I spot that, neon yellow teddy bear inside stalks of cellophane
for the sick child, I spot that. A man is inside the box
of cascading water. He is always wrapped in the present
moment. By now, the silvery water runs over the lines /
of this poem. I feel like shaking for the jet, the cross inside the box.
We are all headed home.

 

The Entrance of Spring

This part of spring still overwhelms me
3-part, unfolded and leaning on the outside
of the stone and unitarian church
the center panel taken up by a lime green blur,
while everyone is inside at the service
the first sign appears and is tall as the building,
part of a plan that is grudgingly shared with me
that’s still no help, I can’t follow along

and by then it’s the third week in May
and leaning outside the church
is a Tarot card with the kind of cherry tree
that grows inside a math problem,
all fractures and color, that exists in a time
in which great problems are solved
an exactness in art, a tree without longing,
a flowering that others have already got right.
The Paramour to the young men in the Science bldg
Tree with pink sleeves—placed on top of the Origins of Spring,
Seven of Cups—a black wind runs through them.

 

Prodigal

Ovals on a shaking stick
black almonds on a branch
a branch with portals
stands up in the foliage of every day
to the foliage of a long day
which is scrambled and unscrambled
mostly yellow and orange pieces
a camouflage of Tuesday
and Biblical passages
champagne and trash can lids
with small numbers in their dis
continued rims.
This time what is said will stick.
A crack in the family plaid.
A sapling, mere novice,
is held up out of a manhole shadow
by a hand in the bleaching cold:

Plaid oil cloth on the table
and the dullard wine bottle,
in the plaster above the table
a drawing of a hole
left by an explosion
inside which is a bottle-green forest
coded pastoral
the place where long ago
the sister left but returned,
and then the olive-green jungle
coded prodigal,
place where the brother left
as the tape of the sky is speeded up.
Exit, robbery, walk-off
escape plan, exile
are ovals in a wood bowl
set on the lid of a shadow,
dish of white portals
from which a stone hand
occasionally sneaks almonds.