|
Five Poems
by Anne
Heide
HareLipped
The hare loves the deer as much. Slips unnoticed beneath
her feet.
Paws her hooves. Slip and mortar. Thirsty water. Who'd been chased:
loved. White fawning over her. The liquid offspring: hatch.
Antlion
Because her body won't agree. Thin teeth that wreck her. Wearing water
to her simple waist, she tastes green to the gullet. Takes green to
the spill. Red leaves fawn out of her mouth: how small she is between
the mates that bore her. Where abdomen meets ground, whose face won't
agree with body. Whose wrecked belly is a starved plain, a better
master. Says, Dear body, I can't agree with you, my face.
Barnacle Geese
He grows
on water, where the tide. Kind water floats him down when he
drops, ripe, to the shore. A squawk. Nodding in the tide. To sleep.
If
he'll roll downhill. Address to the swan: make grey his egg: jealous
of the birth: come from trees. The flesh of this bird. Beaks of shell.
To eclipse the white water, to hatch one of him. A bird called
parasite clings to the bark. A bird called goose snaps at the flood.
Call the growing bird a fruit. One not meant to be taken raw. One
meant to sail inevitable from land. Seedless.
DogPile
The song of the
dog is a low one.
One we'd have done long away
with were it not for its low
resemblance. A wrenlet lit
like something warm. We'd heard rumor.
Some crying down here had been him.
Been a human. Pastures
we traveled. Some time ago
had heard a human had
him. Captive. But had keeled
over the dog. Salt we lay down with.
To fill each other with opposite water.
To fill our bones. All dead discovery.
GreyWhale
If I
could uncatch my hand
between skin and organ
and I would say,
motion it sinks
me forward further
and so I pause.
How to speak to a beast
when the voice
that carries so much
over water I am
afraid you are.
Fish that switch mates
pill
to my arm. Fish that
switch
skin in gendered
flashes.
My hand is oft your skin.
Listening.
Anne Heide has two chapbooks forthcoming in early
2008: Specimen, Specimens (Etherdome) and Residuum::Against
(Woodland Editions). She is currently living in Denver where she
edits the poetry journal CAB/NET. |
