Ace Boggess

“Where Is That Which Ends?”

[question from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem,
“The Last Train Has Stopped”]

In bus depots where old men bend like flawed machines,
collecting dread-filled duffle bags; in French romantic tragedies,
thick as hurt, vague as bonds between the broken;
in Forest Lawn, Arlington, hillside family plots
waning under names soon to erase themselves from stone;
in wrecking yards where oil-slicked hands
carve organs from the steel dead;
in abandoned coal mines of northern West Virginia,
fuel emptied, rust & umber life’s blood bled down streams
like sour milk, like rain; speckled in dirt, dust &
sorrow clothing every oppressed people to rise as one
with cruelty greater than that of their man-god king;
in songs bullets whistle to embedded cameramen from CNN;
in yellowing obituaries kept from the last millennium;
in spider’s silk placed poorly in a doorway overnight;
in arms, eyes, lips of she who greets her lover
with a smile soft as symphony’s first note—
antithesis of conflict, beachheads, enemy combatants:
what leads to climax, falling action, death’s note,
silence, welcome breath, exhale.

 

Return to Volume 1.2

 

 

 

 
 

 

All files © 2005-2012 Blood Orange Review