WALLS

walls

the blankness is
inescapable, it burns on my bedroom
walls.
these days i’ve been thinking of getting a dog.
my girlfriend leaves and i drain the rest of her drink and
pour another and light some incense.
the moon comes.
it doesn’t have the strength
to sort out all the shadows
that the day has left
behind.

River’s So Low

weed
stoned and listening to “Rocky Mountain High”
it lasts thirty minutes
i like driving slow
taking a really long time to make a left turn
it gets on people’s nerves a bit
just now i saw a musk-ox galloping down
Heivly St.
but maybe it was only
two pranksters
in a musk-ox suit.
i’d like to be the guy who drives the
street cleaning machine
making vibrations at 4 am that
get in people’s dreams.
river’s so low has only a handful of water
that jingles like change.

Lamb

One night he was out walking, smoking,
somnambulating, really.
Moving in a reverie, talking to spirits,
talking to himself.
He came across a white thing
it looked like a remnant of snow
it was a trembling lamb.
“The coyotes might get it.”
Like a watercolor of Jesus in an
illustrated children’s Bible he
picked it up and took it home.
This guy, he’d been seen, of late,
standing watery-eyed and bewildered
outside The Haymarket, cut off.
He’d been sleeping on people’s couches,
or behind the dumpsters in Phelps Park
where acrobatic raccoons banged the
lids all night.
A stooped, half-myopic lady, with a pile of
bluish hair that looked bigger than she was,
invited him to stay for free
in the furnished apartment above her hair salon.
I mean, anybody who had a pet lamb...
Autumn came, and then winter.
And then spring again.
The sun rose and set, the light and the dark.
But mostly, the light.

Leonard Cohen and Wine

The other day a friend and I were gluing a
poetry book together my back hurt a little
because the table was too low poems about UFOs
and fireflies and things and Vietnam came up,
her husband had gone, “But he had mental issues
before he went,” and someone else she knew,
a friend who didn’t return, a medic, a conscientious
objector, which means you get to be shot at
for carrying no weapons.
I kept picturing that gentle medic, sandy-haired,
playing his guitar at night for the battle-weary
soldiers. I glued a poem, shit, got it crooked,
undid it, tried again.
My friend’s house is half underground,
pressed against a limestone embankment;
her shelves are full of books that were saved from
burnings and bombed libraries.
At night she dreams in Arabic, her Syrian
uncle comes to her in the backyard of the house
where she grew up in Detroit and gives her a
flowering branch.
My friend’s house has lots of keepsakes and dim
mirrors, talismans, charms, knickknacks and clutter,
seeping water and lichens. It’s a house of nostalgia
and wine and Leonard Cohen on vinyl and
whatever else it takes to stop the
bullets.

Dusk, Alabama

Once in Alabama the universe came to me
in the form of a black dog twinkling with
fleas.
It stared at me I stared at it then it loped
off, fell in a ditch.
A freight train’s heavy horn is the weight
of my heart.
Dog, cosmos, Elohim, fireflies.
If it could always be Alabama,
where time’s only the buzzing of a fly
in an empty bottle,
where piquant katydids shiver my body
in a palsy of all the generations dead and
revenant within me.
Dusk. Alabama. Sitting on the low warm
porch steps watching swallows morph into
bats.

Alex Rainey Ward has been published in The Adirondack Review, Bateau, and The Tiny, among others. Currently, he is living in Batumi, Georgia and teaching English online to Japanese students.