Two Poems

Reginald Shepherd

ROMAN YEAR

Martius

The corrugated iron gates

are rolling down storefronts

in paradise, late light flecks windows,

rain’s acid fingerprints. Motes

float between iron and glass, sink

into sanded pavements, weather’s

footprints, cracked mappa mundi: silk

tea roses with a fringe of plastic fern;

grapes, apples, and bananas ripened

to painted wax: your eyes

blinking away some pollen

in wind that says spring’s coming, wait

for me. Months sometimes it takes

Aprilis

light scrolls across an unmade bed,

we were setting out for Aries

in paper planes (white dwarf stars

bright in a wilderness of wish scatter

white feathers among me, fistfuls

of light): bees busied themselves

with the seen, moment’s

multiple tasks, for the pollen, honey

in the blood, bees would drown

each day: from a thicket of nos

to one sepaled blossoming, all

in an afternoon

you thought of bees as summer

Maius

Heliotrope gaze has fixed me

in its sights (turning solar year suffers

sudden rain, grazes my cold

with vague waves, plashing

particles, but lightly): lightly

take this sky, bound up in so much

loose light, light wind brushes chapped

lips. Light-footed gods break open

day to see what it contains: body

survives light’s inquisitions.

Juniius

beside the shale pigeons a dove

color of old brick dust, the sound

of brick dust settling: traffic noise

rides heat-rise off wet streets, summer

music echoes borrowed air: light

centrifugal, sent scattering, lost later

every day: some gold

against bright water (handfuls

scattered over lake), unnecessary, true

candleland waning to wax

and wick, silver water shattering

like backed glass.

Quintilis

When I was in Egypt, light fell

instead of rain, congealed to grains of sand,

pyramidal, uninterred. Uninterrupted waves

of palms departed for shuddering oases. Why was it

I spent centuries in that mirage, caravanserai

of the sirocco stopped, pausing at

reflection, also called the polished sky,

and still no fall of shade? The light hung

triangular, aslant, touched the colossus

to song.

Sextilis

Wanting to understand, not wanting

to understand, by taking thought you lose it, by not

taking thought. Watching him run a hand

through thinning blond hair, passing

at arm’s length on a lunch hour

street. Wondering is it good now, am I

pleasure, and which part is it I need,

while air migrates too slowly to be seen

and noon crawls groggy over August

skin. Then thinking No, it’s too

and turning back to look at traffic.

September

Sudden storm, then sudden sun. Give me,

I almost said: and stopped, began again

with your voice, what gets invented by the

can’t-be-said-here. The afternoon of after rain

dazzles with cloudlessness and a painful green

set casually against blue: light

mottled by fractal leaves

freckles your outstretched arm,

repeating apple, apple, apple, sour

fruit and crabgrass. A damp T-shirt

takes on that color, nothing

will wash it out. I wear it for weeks.

October

doorway, flutter, moth

or leaf in flight, in fall

foyer, stammer of wind, a patter

hovering, dust hushed or

pressed to trembling

glass, smut, soot, mutter

of moth or withered stem,

late haze, gray stutter

crumpled, crushed,

falter, fall, a tread …

November

williwaw, brawl in air,

shunt or sinew of wind shear

blown off-course, pewter skew

vicinity, winnow and complicit

sky preoccupied with grizzle,

winter feed of lawns’ snared

weathervane, whey-faced day

brume all afternoon of it

(lead reticence of five o’clock)

remnant slate all paucity and drift

salt splay, slur and matte brink

snow stammers against sidewalks

December

White light seen through

the season’s double window

clouding the room reveals the roses’

week-old gift of petals bruised purple-black.

Dry paper falling on white cloth

seconds white room’s wonder

at cold sun flurried, crumbling stars

compacted underfoot: lattice

of fixed clarity, wintrish eidolon

half patience, half in prayer.

NATURALISM

Between them is only difference.

—Saussure

The error was the inspiration

Trees I’ve never seen with names I knew

real word but not true wood,

ginkgo male or female, always

only one kind: a living fossil, oldest

gymnosperm, ‘naked seed,’ reproducing

by means of direct contact

with air (resistant to pests

and pollution): there shouldn’t

be flowers, shouldn’t be fruit

White flowers one book says

are yellow, Ginkgo biloba,

scientific names strew themselves across

damp sidewalks, appellation sheds

petals in May wind, simile, similitude,

have I compared, the only extant

member of its order, Ginkgoales,

Ginkgoaceae, domesticated

by description (extinct otherwise)

Wrong attributes over everything,

petals stuck to soles, imagined

into subject matter, fan-like leaves

framed by mistake, words (Chinese

or Japanese? my sources

are unclear) for silver apricot, silver

nut: tiny plums prized for their kernels

(plum-like), the ripe flesh stench between

two fingers, beneath two feet (which one?)

They fall after first freeze, heavy

with frost (an unambitious tree, wrinkled

fruit barely an inch across: tiny

cherries?), stepped on in early winter

Iowa the stink comes back

of August, late summer smell

smeared through December

(red-purple when the book says

yellow, and smelling of nowhere)

Write only what you see, it said,

first this, first that (I walked past them

every day, under them, three in a sidewalk

row: a commonplace tree, no real interest

at all, reeking fruit fouls the sidewalk all fall,

cross the street to avoid them)

The read tree and the real tree

(this happens only in writing): never

an even number, three of one kind

Knowing the names with nothing

to paste them onto (trees I’d seen

but never known, misnomer

printing petals on wet pavements): just one

kind at a time, white four-petaled

flowering May, clear green lobed leaves

cover summer, gold in fall (perhaps

some strain of ornamental plum):

first come flowers, first come leaves

Not the same tree at all

—for Robert Philen and Lawrence White