I fold the silence into paper,
address it to your absence,
and let the ink wander
where my voice could not.

Every word is a bridge half‑
built across distance,
collapsing into the river
before you ever arrive.





.

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                          “You in the West…”

“You in the West don’t know what it’s like to be ruled by peasants.”


                                              Oh, yes, we do.


Cf. P. 138, Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan

With this Parthian shot at our kakistocracy I say good-bye for a week or so to you, dear fellow scribblers and scriveners and dreamers and artists and intellectuals (that is a fine, useful word) and lovers of freedom, for like Bilbo I’m off on an adventure!

Jenny Mechanical is too mecha for the main house
but too human for the tool shed.
She can turn stripped screws, whip up a perfect grilled cheese,
provide power during an outage and mow and mulch while she's at it.
She also dreams of a recharging kiss and poems appear at her fingertips.

Jenny had a little lamb whose fleece was made of synthetic polymer
and everywhere that Jenny went, the lamb was sure to follow her.

See Jenny Mechanical, stopped in the middle of the front yard,
telling her lamb to look at the new leaves with its LED eyes.
She has always been a perfectly average 5 foot 3, can open any jar, pick any lock,
but she is leaking into its faux wool because of something beyond utility.

Jenny Mechanical can eat no fat, nor either any lean
and yet between the two of them she knows her grease from cream.

Still, as Jenny could tell you, mere maintenance is not love
and the poems at her fingertips have diverged from factory settings,
glowing pink
then rose
then lavender
then blue
then indigo
to create from refraction a lovely illusion, a rainbow or so it seems.
___

I could have gone to the cemetery,
or back to my high school lab,
find him lecturing from a podium,
bony finger raised,
demagogue of the dead.
I could break him down piece by piece,
cram him in a duffle,
a femur jutting the zipper.
Ignore the groan-
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Instead I found myself
in the carnival lot,
The dog was long dead,
the sign kept guard.
Rusty rides slouched like tumbleweeds.
Cotton candy in memory-
blue tack crunching my teeth.
Lewd.

Skeletons fixed on poles,
spiked up through pelvis and spine.
Use ****.
Grip shoulders. twist. lift.
When one slid free,
he collapsed into my arms
all bone-light, lovely,
mine at last.

I just brought him home.
Sat at the kitchen table.
Named him Curly.
Zoom howled: WAG’s gone weird!
What’s his name? What’s his name?

His name is Curly,
I said, but I knew
his name was You.

We drink wine by the pool.
He never sips.
Sometimes I pour a second glass for the glint.
Sometimes he tells me Danny Elfman
wants to play his ribs like a xylophone.
Sometimes he sighs,
he hates Oingo Boingo.
I laugh. Obliging.
So do I.

When the wind kicks up
he smells of sugar and rust.
Sometimes he rattles the glassware.
Sometimes he won’t sit still.
Skeletons are
by nature
never satisfied.

Hello, Doctor.
Welcome.

What a relief to see your bag.
No, not your tiresome shirts and socks
and your dime novels;
I mean your black bag, filled with the shining apparatus of life.

Follow me up the stairs, if you would be so kind.
Do you like the dark oak?
We find it somber, like a casket.

This is why we need you so desperately.
We have nearly given in!
So used, are we, to the predations and the despair,
that we women wear black, even at Easter time,
and the men drink, and are sick on the front lawn.

I apologize, Doctor.
You've only just arrived, and I haven't asked you about your trip.
Did you have a nice seat on the train?
Were there porters and cooks,
solicitous conductors?
A woman across the aisle, saying her rosary and weeping?
Monsters and archangels in your fitful dreams,
shooting it out like they do in the moving pictures?

I'm teasing, Doctor.
Forgive me for my familiarity.
Forgive me for trampling upon your necessary reserve.
Do you know why I was the one chosen to meet you?
It is because I am the sanest one here.
I am the limb that can, perhaps, be saved above the knee.
I have a nice singing voice,
but can no longer afford the risk to indulge it.

Are you good with severe injuries, Doctor?
You're not just some kindly old hand-holder, are you?
Here, one has to have eyes in the back of one's head.
We form fierce attachments all in a single afternoon;
a glance becomes a kiss becomes a fevered coming together,
and all before the dinner bell.

Don't look so disapproving, Doctor.
In this place, life isn't a game of whist in the stuffy parlor.
We must rip at it, and at each other, as one would a carcass,
or we starve,
gnawing on fear as if it were a rib.

Have you seen our Wolf yet, Doctor?
Were you uneasy, sitting on the box seat on the way in?
As a physician, you know how the organs and sinews are knit together...
did a tremor run through yours, like doomed babies holding each other?
Let me tell you about our Wolf.
After you've unpacked and taken tea,
I'll take you to the graveyard,
where the earth is always freshly turned.

Our Wolf is large, the same off-white as the doilies on the table downstairs.
The hired man we keep insists that there are no wolves here,
the last one having been shot years ago.
He swears it was a bear, or a cougar,
that gave him that ugly scar across his face.
He admits he didn't really see it, though,
and that was when he could still see, at all.
Now he sits polishing the silver, like an Irish servant girl,
fuming under his breath.

I saw our Wolf myself, Doctor,
when I was out gathering tomatoes from our vines,
just feet from the main house.
There he was, standing as still as January,
staring at me from next to the smokehouse.
Something in me shriveled, like a frost-struck bloom,
and I thought, "Cook will have to improvise her sauce tonight."
The fresh red pickings rolled out of my apron and onto the ground
like so many drops of blood.

It let me walk away, Doctor.
I've been distracted and unpredictable since.
Some wolves eat the organs first, did you know that?
The heart, the liver, what have you.
Tell me, what is it in these bodies that makes us animate?
Are we just some accident of chemistry, when we hope, dream,
fall in love?
Are we nothing but green vines with red eyes,
dumbly waiting?

Once again, I apologize, Doctor.
You're tired and want to unpack.
Will you think of your wife and children,
or does your head fill like a well bucket with the stuff of achievement,
overflowing?

Come down to dinner when you're ready.
We eat on the veranda,
because we have to keep the big table clear
to lay the injured on.
After dinner, relax a while, enjoy a cigar, read your journals.
Then, take a walk in the evening air, just at sunset.
Watch for our Wolf, though,
and I'll watch for you, from behind the curtain.

Goodbye, Doctor.
I mean for now, of course,
but I wouldn't unpack everything, if I were you.
Don't tax yourself the way our previous doctor did.
I don't think he really understood the things that come upon us here,
sudden and hard,
and always from an oblique angle.
Rest now, Doctor.
I'll let everyone know you've arrived,
except for our Wolf
who already knows.
__

Little fox,
I've come to confess to you

though I know your church is the chicken coop
and your Christ is appetite.

If there is mist up on the mountain,
it's my spirit wandering.

The rest of me kneels here,
before you in the brambles like an overturned cup.

Alone in my bed, I have wondered
why I hurt my lovers, why they hurt me,

but I think it's because
angels are so similar to layers

especially when a spray of white feathers
in the air is all that's left.

Little fox, here is my spirit
riding wrapped around your slender black feet.

Let's test our hearts and pull a wishbone--
you've got plenty cast aside.

If I win, I'll change my ways and skew to kind.
And if you win?

I'll call him, saying let's try again
knowing what will happen, and how sly my words have been.

It’s just me, out of my mind
sipping on helium, pondering
why a tuna fish sandwich
is on a vegan menu, and how
to install a security system on
a dollhouse without a door
or glass on the windows.

I’m not pretty when I’m backed
in a corner, but hey, there are
those who don’t listen when
I say my vocabulary has teeth.

There aren’t any caution signs
on a poet … They can hop from
a flower poem to beneath an umbraculum
so dark with honesty a reader will
seek a priest even if they’re not catholic.

So if you don’t have a tornado shelter,
don’t create the storm … I’m not pretty
when backed in a corner, and not timid
about writing with my teeth.

In the Rhambangle, the climbing vines
looped themselves up and through the latticework
like emotions falling from a dream.

You loved the hour-bound birds who made their nests
in the high corners; feathered keepers
without ceremony, counters of our soft seconds and all the rest.

I liked your boots, especially tucked beneath a wicker chair
in the moonlight, lost to your feet
but called a curious thing by the avante garde among the moths of local wing.

I haven't said it well, I realize. My irises kept the words
after I first saw them in morning light.
It's a fool's errand, so they say, making these sounds no string nor key would own,

but I keep trying, because I love you down to the detail, the divinity, the dissonance, and the bone.

Autumn and I dance
October’s two step
across earth feeling
the stardust in our limbs
drawing us closer
to the moon.

Impatient bleak holds
its brush to paint
our waning on the
stark canvas
of winter’s landscape.

Even with a calendar
determined to strip
us down to fading,
we are bursts
of burnished gold
encouraging the sky
to dress in its deepest blue.