A.V. Christie

Three Poems

KNIVES AND HONEY

Knives and Honey
The weeping willow is spangled, a brilliancy of ice.
And the horses—all bays—are steaming.

We buried her at night.

Beware of making your fears into dogma.
When the tanker Prestige, off the coast of Spain,
sinks and is leaking crude oil—sing

lullay lullay 

and send the bright sorrow of gladiolas.
When there are still traces of tritium in the devoted
honeybees near Los Alamos—know this is love
in the modern era.

GETAWAY

Time-change hours
hours that can find no ledge
take no hold in me, streaming
a noon as my bones
feel the evening through.

And a tourist’s breeze there, butterflies
from the shaded back of the villa
gravel and lavender, pulled through
the opened doors, opened windows
and out to a blaze
and heat at the front.

Cauterizing sun.

This purity you wanted
it isn’t in me:
a casino of want
the pigeons wheeling up
those companionable, dirty birds.

AFTER A SOAP OPERA

Dear G—
When you were young, you asked why? and why?
and I’d explain how the room was fake—
the boat was fake—it was not a real boat.
So much of it that was made up.
I felt like saying the gypsy moth tents
all everywhere in branches were parabolas
to thicken the spring. Now through this week
I am thinking of you because gleaming, the grey
flank of the Derby winner goes by, and gleaming
our sedan is totaled—in the front seat your postcard of ruins.
So, yesterday at the museum, some replica of the Titanic
rising up, an assumption entirely out of clothespins…
and I’m wondering, darling—the full choir,
the motet rising from the cassette tape,
the clutch welling at the sternum—what is a true thing?