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Two Poems
by Geoff Bouvier


A Heart’s Content

Whatever’d moved in made great angles. Admired a camber and inheritor’s design. Comparison pointed homeward, comparison.
            After fairer forests, plants enthickening, pre-pomp yet post-disgust, flocks flocked approximately appropriately. Lacks around the greening id precipitated introcircumspection.
            Whoever’d find happiness in any state’d jingle coins now, not be jangled by change, even single out songs. Scarves becoming doves at time’s sleight-of-behest’d become becoming to anyone who’d be anyone happy, by then. Meanwhile, three hands itch a face. And moving in the matter, what abides?
            A day, all night, might park anywhere, unflappable as a beefeater. But at dawn – soon – all will be song.
            (To the tin man’s tune), “I’d put a quarter in it, and I’d keep it there a minute, if I only had a pocket.”



This Care Case I Carry Pain In, Apace

Unwitting heading in the phonebook: Ovarian Pacific. Dreamt my shoes broke. Glad my system got that out of it, a myth’s-worth. It entered like an object that mattered, like a king or lunch, one under his own power and the other on a snack tray.
            I’m the Bound Man, if you’re keeping score; led shackled homeward by a Fiery Bride, my protectress in lucent garb who tried, nevertheless, forevermore. Four ears rung lobeless, months, at gratuitous madness. Not the final figure, though, I’d have to add.
            A clock wears nerves, thinned in solutions, talking over, ticked off. There, wherein liars must’ve rubbed. So one sews what one can, seams between the senses, sews the news long…
            Opinions wrinkled, having cooled wadded…
            But a bird had lain a song there, safe. Watched, it hatched. A total ellipse of the one.
            Elated, I deleted loss; can yuk it up truculently. So, wattage, you think, is what light’s here for?
            Still, pigeons sit and shit on the sill. Tides ripen. In defense of not facing, defacing the fencing. And refuge in a room attuned to sound.
            In a locked and sunless chest, new feelinglocations. Same old heartolalia.

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, was selected by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman Prize. His writings have appeared in dozens of journals, including American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, jubilat, New American Writing, Western Humanities Review, and VOLT. He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1997. He currently lives in San Diego, where he publishes journalistic prose for The San Diego Reader.