Sara Dudo - Two Poems
SACRIFICE
Atlantic City spews
its light, exiling marsh
lifedew & deathfog.
Casinos are white teeth
of an ugly mouth gaping,
brilliant from afar.
August, I leave pearl earrings.
Teach me to grieve
with ambition, his body
with an expiration date.
Ambitious grief:
exchanging light & ceiling
fan air funneling down his back.
He might die at any time,
call it stasis, call it synchrony.
In apricot sheets, I challenge
autumn. You understand
the way this makes extinct
all regret, as with snow
resting on window lip stale
in dusk’s porous light.
On his knees, he could be
a bay window bounding
with sunlight, frosting over.
His chest a light cluster,
a cumuli swaying corn.
Flute of words−
think of our bodies as seeds
blown in from shore wind,
scent of goldenrod & phlox.
We must plant them.
We must die. We must
birth back something new.
Bathe me in the moonwash,
metamorphose a tulip of light,
smooth the epoxy till I am
a spring of water welling up
to eternal life where I’d watch
him grown, where I’d, for
a small lifetime, hold him up
in front of the sun.
SOMA
His arms butterflied
to the carpet:
Luna snakes her small hands
under Uncle Ray’s armpits,
little fingers digging
at horseshoe ribs.
Her laugh glitters the room.
*
Some time ago, bluets growing
in large groups.
A small child
in a raincoat
walking through spruce.
Deer passage and clouds bolster
cotton candy drums:
a little girl
obsesses over white
porous bones
of a deer, then the skull
of a raccoon.
*
He opens his mouth in a yowl and
allows the attack, shaking the table
with yellow carnations
shimmying condolences
card pinned to a sprig.
Luna is so beautiful:
the cure for all
false-light
*
Every child learns
storms don’t care
to relieve drought:
they heave when they need,
sit on the porch with your father
and wait for the lights.
*
He plucks her up, her body hovering
airplane above his body,
curls of lemon and light suspend
a pair of light-up shoes
dangle in the air of bodies
that have come and have gone.
Pearls
of rain.