Winter Palace
By my hands I hang in the bedroom
of a man's strange mind.
The walls are lined with fleurs-de-lis
made from the fur of mice.
Smoke climbs in the chimney.
Yet another plague—
in northern pastures long-nosed horses
stamp at the smell of bodies
burning behind the castle.
The rope around my fingers creaks,
moths bang against the window,
a doctor stumbles up the walk—
the corners are full of needles
to help me sleep,
mice lie like kings in their copper traps.
Keep still, he says,
the vein is hard to find
without a little pinch. See?
Supervision is so
much better than freedom.
Troy
We had a drink and got in bed.
That's when the boat in my mouth set sail,
my fingers drifting in the shallows of your buzz cut.
And in the sound of your eye
a skiff coasted—boarding it
I found all the bric-a-brac of your attic gloom,
the knives from that other island trip,
the poison suckleroot lifted from God-knows-where.
O, all your ill-begotten loot—and yes, somewhere,
the words you never actually spoke,
the woven rope tethering
me to this rotting joint. Touch me,
and the boat and the city burn like whiskey
going down the throat. Or so it goes,
our love-wheedling myth, excessively baroque.
Hunt
The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,
it never ends, it must be kept to
like a schedule. When it is fine, it is fine,
and the night's hounds flinch from it.
Foxes run under dark cover of leaves;
the glacier, trapping everything unused, melts.
Everything natural to us must be learned.
The broken laugh, the branching glance,
the wood beneath the green, embarking skin.
The light of the mind is red. It is a red street,
and a cold home stands at its darkening end,
toward which foxes run through clicking leaves.
(c) 2007 by Meghan O'Rourke. All rights reserved.
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