- Marvin Bell
-
- Two Pictures Of A Leaf
-
-
- If I make up this leaf
- in the shape of a fan, the day's cooler
- and drier than any tree. But if
- under a tree I place before me
- the same leaf as on a plate,
- dorsal side up and then its ribs
- set down like the ribs of a fish--
- then I know that fish are dead to us
- from the trees, and the leaf
- sprawls in the net of fall to be
- boned and eaten while the wind gasps.
- Ah then, the grounds are a formal ruin
- whereon the lucky who lived
- come to resemble so much that does not.
-
-
- Obsessive
-
- It could be a clip, it could be a comb;
- it could be your mother, coming home.
- It could be a rooster; perhaps it's a comb;
- it could b your father, coming home.
- It could be a paper; it could be a pin.,
- It could by your childhood, sinking in.
-
- The toys give off the nervousness of age.
- It's useless pretending they aren't finished:
- faces faded, unable to stand,
- buttons lost down the drain during baths.
- Those were the days we loved down there,
- the soap disappearing as the water spoke,
-
- saying, it could be a wheel, maybe a pipe;
- it could be your father, taking his nap.
- Legs propped straight, the head tilted back;
- the end was near when he could keep track.
- It could be the first one; it could be the second;
- the father of a friend just sickened and sickened.
-
-
- Origins of Dreams
-
- Out from muted bee-sounds and musketry
- (the hard works of our ears, dissembling),
- under steeply-held birds (in that air
- the mind draws of our laid breathing),
- out from light dust and the retinal gray,
- your face as in your forties appears
- as if to be pictured, and will not go away.
-
- I have shut up all m cameras, really,
- Father, and thought I did not speak to you,
- since you are dead. But you last;
- are proved in the distance of a wrist.
- Your face in dreams sends a crinkly static
- and seems, in its mica- or leaf-like texture,
- the nightworks of the viscera.
-
- But feeling's not fancy, fancying you.
- I don't forget you, or give stinks for the thanks.
- I think I think the bed's a balcony,
- until we sleep. Then our good intentions
- lower us to the dead, where we live.
- I think that light's a sheet for the days,
- which we lose. Then we go looking.
-
