The Slip
​
Confident
I will get my feet
back under me in time,
​
since over green fields I’d run
with power full of grace,
as against the faulty city throngs
I long had weaved untouched,
​
I am peaceful as the landscape skews;
soon enough
I will out-gain
its new velocity.
But when my steps shorten
instead of lengthen,
if I smells a lapse,
doubts my power
-- if my grace quavers –
it must be from exhaustion
I shut my eyes hard
-- brace hard for landing --
trust that hard rising ground
will not abuse me but
notwithstanding wince,
knowing as I know
that I only ever fall
in darkness
J. O'Brien
Occupied Blight
Always between
the last of the brain's
end-of-day wane
and sleep we speak,
or I do.
Does he hear,
the landlord,
while I beg
for renovation,
if not eviction?
I exist between him and the tenant
who all day prior to my pleading
I hear working at survival.
There's a message in his urgent scurry:
the things I do to live
weaken the structure,
deteriorate the interior.
Everything is getting looser,
everything is less secure.
The jambs are warped,
the whole frame is leaning.
You are falling down.
Is this the way every body ends:
a soul begins to panic,
to scurry more urgently.
With every chunk of plaster
that falls, with every patch
of rust that rises fear spreads
and the soul's breathing labors.
Does anyone know a good contractor?
Have I the resources?
Is there an authority to appeal to?
J. O'Brien
You Are Shaking
​
Sister is shaken
as the masks withdraw
outlaws out
over a desert palette
the colors of vein
and spleen
and a heart
that tears and is torn
by love or hate
or hunger
in the dry
of her memory
she sees it
and it seizes her:
that time
she ran away alone
and in the night
it rained
and in the dark
she spied under moonlight
a stone,
petrified heart
of a bear she said,
purple and firm to the touch.
In the dry bed
of an absent stream
as the masks
become iotas in the empty air
pretense becomes
improbable
you hear
a sound like rainfall
and see that odd,
smooth, broken
stone beneath
the gathering creek and know
it was never
a bear’s heart dear outlaw
but your heart
waiting to be washed away with rain
