Spies
In the snow speckled pines were spies,
black, oval-eyed spies, watching,
discovering, reporting our actions to
no one save themselves and the cold
rain that fell steadily in a slight slant,
each grey-mirrored drop producing its
own metallic sound, wrapping around
thin twig tips, traveling in clear layers
before gathering to form larger
splotches that met the cracked
sidewalk with elegy sighs, laid on our
numb ears as faint yellow songs we
had once remembered. The spies were
silent though arrant, graveyard still,
oblivious to our eyes, our breath drifting
up and through their canopy of dark
green needles that whispered in the
February chill. We left them, a part of
ourselves, on that sidewalk beneath
brass plates, engraved scrolls of
names that told nothing of the demons
that had besieged any of those there,
told nothing, nothing...just as the
spies who watched and were silent.
Hollow
What was unclear, surrendered, fallow,
this morning when you woke with the
thick taste of cheap brandy and
menthol cigarettes in your mouth?
The sidewalk shifts beneath your feet
in staggering patterns of blurry gray
honeycombs. The thin sky hangs
as blue as you've ever seen it , the
tomato sun seeming more of a trespasser
than master of its house. What have you
left? What stifled sounds are lonely
there? They were sleeping in
troubled innocence when you left them
to nights receding shadows, mornings
sounds of pigeons beginning their
early, endless hunt for food, garbage
men banging aluminum trash cans, the
hollow, shrill sound, reminding you of
every no you'd ever heard. You pick
up the receiver from the graffitied phone
booth at the corner grocery, kicking aside
paper restaurant cups, flattened cardboard
six-packs, twisted, empty cigarette boxes.
The phone is answered on the seventh ring.
You tell him that you have money, there's a
pause, then a muffled, "waiting on you."
Back on the sidewalk, you thumb through
the bills, stepping quicker, your breath
slamming your lungs. He promised not to do it,
again, to them, if you got your ass back to the
apartment in a hurry. A moment later, you think
you hear your daughter screaming in your head.
For an instant, you stand as still as death.
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