mindbombs

Lady Talgarth to Alexander Topcliffe
alan wall
from Lenses, published 1997 by Colophon Press

Sir,

I begin to understand your long preoccupation.

Now I see what you mean by being given new vision. How before
Galileo no human eye had ever seen the satellites of Jupiter, no
hand ever drawn up a map of the moon,
its craters and shadows.

Perhaps at times the rough-cast features of the moon
remind you of my own poxed face?
And perhaps you prefer to keep us both at a like distance?

You never pressed your body on me
when we were left alone
for hours at a time
but observed always
a stellar propriety.




DECEMBER
eli patterson


Invested and unrequited, we were crazy, tumbling in and
out of our secret realities. You showed me a new way to believe
in things I’d lost in sandboxes and in blizzards rising above my
adolescent knees. And every night, talking to you on the phone,
I’d steal some of those terrible things so they could not eat me
up. We were smashed porcelain angels drowning in the reverie
of our lightly-falling anthrax snowflakes.