Deaf Poetry
Suggest to me a pasture,
an open field, unploughed,
with a gate; no fence,
just a gate
at the far end of the field.
And from that gate
you feel sound,
what you believe to be sound –
rolling under your feet
surging through your spine.
Then I will suggest to you
that I have seen the stallion
that roams and rattles this field
pass through that gate
unbridled, beckoning;
and if we follow
we may, from time to time
fence him, feed him
and touch him with our hands.
Astrology
If I could pour myself into a cradle, waiting
or squeeze like cheese through the eye of a needle
I would lie down, fall upward
in half integers of time
rest my head on a cloud
and watch the stars live their lives.
Watch them appear and disappear,
arrange and rearrange,
asymmetrical, misaligned
and connect them as dots (look - a lion
- and over there a hunter with two dogs!)
searching always for the face of God.
I would close my eyes and listen
to soft cries cascade over me as they
turned themselves into white dwarfs
the size of sugar cubes.
Put them in my tea
and watch them dissolve,
spilling over the edge of my cup
past the ends of my table,
spreading like wind, like the sound of wind
over yards and fields, forest and ocean
never falling simply bending, as light does, like prayer
when it reaches the horizon
seeking the shortest path home.
The Ventriloquist
Artificial air she called it without
a hint of irony. The hand
learns to catch it – the voice you see -
and soon it acquires its own face.
At first she said the whole thing feels
like a pose, an over-sized mask
looking back at you, awkward
to hold, difficult to manage
especially in the company of others.
But with years of practice, hours
of shared intonation
it slowly comes into its own –
an intimate echo of yourself
to yourself; voice thrown again
and again into the wind, returning
reassuring, until the hand
finally catches the tongue
and the arm holding the back
feels just right.
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