Like paper flowers but more mortal
Which isolates us all the more
In Aristotle's cabinet
We should at least acknowledge it

In rumpled clothes covered with dust,
I would give much to "reproduce"--
I love the beauty of that word!--
And here we lounge, the two of us

Still cutting lemons into segments,
Avid travellers within walls
Tinted with flowers, lined with prints
And yet not to be trifled with

While choosing colors for two portraits
In that haunted medium
That rolls so gamely from our tongues
We do each other gentle wrongs

Along the highest tautest tightropes
Of our bodies' architecture
Listening to Newton's lecture
Ordinal or cardinal

That pauses briefly then alights
Imaginary in our presence
"Watch the house," I tell the chaplain
Tell me everything you know

And I in turn will tell you all
That lies behind this barricade
Of shadows crumbling on the wall
These Englishmen with long, slim fingers

Left with nothing to defend
Chiefly uphill, through trackless jungle
As my heart performs tattoos
O strange tattoos against my ribs, and your eyes

Hazed as two great lamps, doused jets
Of gas as lashes flutter
In a last ecstatic shudder
In this fashionable hour

Young Friedrich of the Ice Floes

Standing on a cliff and seeing the two lovers alone
Fragrant with sawdust and honey
He wants weight at the bottom--eight double-basses if possible--
But thirty miles from Denmark where the ice floes kiss the hills
Friedrich does not stipple or use short strokes
His gutteral utterances suggest the depth of his grief
That's Friedrich all right, obsessed with death, transience, the grave--
The years could easily melt away with nothing to show for them
And who among us would remember after a lapse of time?
Him with his handmade basket--handmade because it's flawed--
Those clunky wooden shoes, two failed metaphors for transport--
I want to ask, What do you think you know that other people don't?
Where the banks along the pathways to the cliff are sliced away
Amethyst is his birthstone, and he just keeps on asking for it
Till the lovers step off the bench and disappear into the sea--
Thoreau and Kerouac--a fine pair for the spring!

The Talking Cure

How could I let this happen, how did I let it get out of hand?
She made so many threats that she never followed through on
Working long hours in a darkroom, the red light on outside
It seems to me that we lose ownership of our own bodies
When--what's the phrase, in like a lion, out like a lamb--in an open sloop
We reach the tip of what is a huge and complicated iceberg
Too small to ignore or shatter, too large to shoot a tunnel through,
It just floats there like so many issues of hair and dress and preference
You feel the need to pray you'll regain the use of your limbs--
Yes, it's like writing to someone except there's never a response--
You should keep the water boiling, keep on rubbing your hands with glee
The albatross should be weightless, a pack of seagulls stuck in the mast
When what happens first to the infant then to the child shapes the way
Each horn of a crescent moon bends and points the way to luck--
But the picture's developing now, you understand what's being asked
And what grinds those war-time slogans down to powder

Ned Balbo's poetry collection Galileo's Banquet won the 1998 Towson University Prize for Literature. In 2002 he was Walter E. Dakin Fellow in poetry at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and also received the Crab Orchard Review John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize for his essay "Walt Whitman's Finches: on autobiography and adoption." His poems are out or forthcoming in Dogwood, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and in Air Fare, an anthology of poems on flight (Sarabande Books).


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