The Bard of Liminga — Ray Sharp

In the Dunes

2 a.m., 2-below, bivouacked downstairs

under the south window, adrift

in the dunes with Port and Kit.

We’re bouncing in the back of the truck

from El Ga’a to Sbâ , sirocco blown grains

of snow, typhoid fever death chill gale –

only one of us will return.

Down, down the deep well of night

paralyzed by the thought that

the sky hides the night behind it,

shelters the person beneath

from the horror that lies above.

Consulting Madame La Hiff’s Gypsy Dream Dictionary

waiting for a sign in the indolent heat.

Later – has it been minutes or weeks?

– the full moon breaks through the ground blizzard

like a midday Sahara sun.    I wish I were

on the terrace of the Café d’Eckmühl-Noiseux

under the awning a-flap in the soft evening breeze

reading the maps, or on the surface

of the immaculate moon aloft

in the center of the sheltering sky.

January 2003

 

 

Perihelion

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument,

our solar system is a swirl in the ageless eyes of God,

that planets ride elliptical tracks of Design,

slung hard by God’s holy lariat;

too slow and you’re pulled into the sun,

too fast and you skid into the lonely beyond

like a skater who can’t hold the turn.

Poems are sky-born bodies, too, orbiting light-pulsed       thought

when words have burned or flown away, and our  earthly bodies,

like planets that move faster when they are closer to the sun,

fall together perfectly toward sweet perihelion;

and I feel the eyes of God upon us

in the gaze of the cat on the pillow a whisker away.

Our Lord, if there were a God, would tell us to be happy.

January 2003

 

Your old fur coat

Lately my life’s like your old fur coat

small skin squares stitched together

in the shape of a human torso and arms

frayed and coming apart at the seams

a bit shabby and neglected and overdue

for the needlework of diligent hands to

stitch me up and make me whole

or better yet just pull me close

across your red sweater this cold

cold night won’t get me down

because now I see it’s the body within

that warms the coat and gives it shape

and nothing else except of course

a matching fur hat.

February 2003

 

 

Baghdad 

Everyone had this strange compulsion

to pause like minarets in the ritual wind

and listen

because they were convinced

that the tautness could not go on

indefinitely

that some day something had to happen

that much was certain but what form

the release

might take could only be guessed at

and lying out on the roof at night

under the stars

I strain my ears trying to imagine

I hear perhaps in the direction of

Arbataash

the faint sound of voices calling

but it is always the presence

of silence

broken now and then by a sleepy rooster

crowing on some distant housetop

or a cat 

wailing in the street below or a truck

far out on Mosul Road

backfiring

bang bang

it coasts down the long hill to the Tigris

fertile old giver of life.

February-March 2003

 

Raindrops

He dresses by the laundry room window,

one quick knot reflected in the rain-streaked glass.

Raindrops like comets or time-elapse stars.

Rivulets like braided streams in the river delta,

arteries pulsing through fleshy silt-lands.

Somewhere in the spring night, bombs are raining.

Later this morning he will straighten the tie.

March 20, 2003 

Sternwheeler

So you mostly walk the deck
and watch the shoreline slip away,
Indiana on the left, Kentucky on the right,
your world shrinking down
to the girl, the boat and the enveloping dark.
You hang out over the stern railing
above the paddlewheel that mows
through muddy green meadows of river
and churns out frothy haystacks,
dark hills of just-lived moments
receding one by one into night.
You hold hands like there’s no letting go,
like you won’t slip into the churning.

January, thinking of May