Michael Sikkema – Two Poems


Michael Sikkema

Two Poems

Essay


Edges fading to open solid borders hum the fluid insides.  Less like a puzzle than a cheese bar.

All the do poems lined up against all the about poems.  The angle of all this seeing should at

least be denied like civilian casualties.  This heaviness is

                                                                             flamboyant as

                                                                                         a thumbprint

                                                                             or a sonata.  All the do poems laid down with

all the about poems and we caught them kissing.  Sooner or later the game show truth comes

true.  You’re left with a blender and six new sets of living room furniture.  One house has sixteen

windows.  One house has none.  You can’t go on like this.  The city is/was five miles by five

miles. 20 year old soldiers paint

                         messages on

             the bombs before

                                                 they drop them.  The radical fact of being is not really.  No more

than no more again.  No more than suddenly not being.  Anger wets everywhere and the room is

smaller than yesterday.  She says “there’s a ring around the moon.”  She’s inside a radio there is

no she.  But I hear “a thing among the room.”  I hear traffic through tree sounds and birds which

there are none.  You keep writing  frame  edge  glass mirror  eye  yellow key  net.  .  As if you
weren’t me.  Anger in this soil’s

                                                 memory has something

                                                                                     to do with us.  There is the tendency to push

the house inside the room.  As if the writer weren’t the reader.  There is a new movement in

denial.  Atmospheric dust contains a magnetic charge.  American soldiers are “investing” in Iraqi

dinars.  Human bodies bounce when hitting the ground at high speeds.

Time Was There Was No Question

A person pictures the camera backwards facing light.  He has four sons, a gender like five sons walking between buildings.  Red shirts, red towels, and red sheets fill with wind, false-bottomed sky. Men in boats shout anthems.  Lift becomes left.  He and his sons uncover the document, the magic one, near a window front filled with cut-glass dolphins leaping from cut-glass water.  They open to a two-page sketch of screw gardens and milk.  The youngest son traces a scrotum motif, a melon split. The oldest tears it up, makes demands, a list of questions.  The others go for tea, clean dirt.  The camera angle adjusts to turn faces.

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