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Two Poems 

Elias Siqueiros

Pastels

The village exists where you left it.
I can see the leap
of houses unaccounted for,
ancestors tied to the air, ships never built lined up
to the horizon.
This is the home of the worried,
the weightless.
This is the door that does not open or close.
It exists to perception as one exists to one’s god.
Standard enough. Actually, quite below standard.
The air is thick, it should have rained.
I should have done more.
You should have awoken me from my self-pity.

Mary Made of Sleep

That long winter I found a coffee shop
partially closed, partially open,
ran by an ex-convict.
Mary was the barista most of the time.
She smiled easily and as she knit shawls she sang
very low.

That winter the snow came up to the ears.
Birds died in retreat,
the sun was never to resume its previous place
of political transparency.
Mary sang, knitting,
you had to lean into yourself to see the shawls,
small as they were, pieced together
from rash decisions.

Her hair was gold like a long-buried god.
I remember her hands were bruised
and heavy.
I said, Mary, what’s that you’re singing? She said
nothing,
just the wind opening and closing the mill door of
your memory.

It’s true, ten years have gone by.
I train pigeons to recreate her absence with a
particular movement mid-air
of leaves falling, forks dropping.
I discontinue my internet service, shut my
phone down, with nothing to do
but watch.