Poems from Trinket Poems

Aporia

Her thighs through the slit of red kimono
glimmer and shift on the ghostly iron
bedstead. Outside the tattered lace curtain
rain falls, still, rain, as she arches a foot
back and forth, idly, flexing, extending
her toes with their pearly pink nails in time
with Bing Crosby on the radio, “White
Christmas,” though here on the streets the sailors
stagger and weave toward the Café Bohème
as she lounges, smoke rising, a single
cigarette. The god has taken her breast.
Carve her shame on the walls, still the question
remains, what space for the sacred
in this century? …The actress playing
Trinket, the aging woman whose fingers
never stop moving over the bedposts,
the chenille, who cannot draw hard enough
on the stage non-nicotine cigarette,
her warm breast fills her hand every time her
hand flies to her chest to mark its absence.
So what is missing, after all? Well, what
if the shut door opened in this seedy
New Orleans hotel room, what if the womb
of the actress playing Trinket blossomed
again because the bright god entered,
Mardi Gras beads dropping from her stunned hands?

Of Trinket, of Mary

When you stand by the radio after
the Sailor spurns you, and because it is
silent, the cathedral empty, you know
the Christ child has been born, your hand wanders
to that absence as if He seeks the thin blue
milk, the veined orb beneath the cloth of stars—
As your Sailor sleeps his brutal sleep you speak
of the Christ child, his blind sweet hands
fumbling beneath the robes of his mother,
and Trinket, I had that. Rocking or
in bed, or carrying my babies beneath
my pink ruana as I walked hours
and hours through the summer woods, their lips
pulling down the starry river, I had that.