2 New Poems

Mercury Liquid

It’s a shimmer, heated daze of
consciousness brought with black dress delusions,
heavy clang of emptied party tables,
bare whiskey cupboards, ever-rising AM alarms,
set like you couldn’t believe they were,
too early for what begins at dusk and lasts.

You waltz through balcony rooms,
as if amber wheat in ricepaper dawns,
as if scything swish-swirls in balletic heel,
as if you were straight off the Thames in silver,
not with some drab-dressed closeness,
in the Rideau apartment walk-ups,

where the thermostat setting broke twice.

Dousing

You’ll make some sort of splash,
a hallowed kind as baptism in
Ballymore pitch, but all the best
in ondine eruption, mythical rite
not taken, Gaelic runes unworn,
as you weren’t that, not ever.

Still somehow in spectral projections,
blinkered film canisters, you remain,
pitch-corrected as a pop song,
but in greater wonder held;
it’s a certain shame, the turn-about
of spaces light, I imagine
taking you to, crystal Sofia palaces;

not a post-communist princess,

but, still, you impress like one.