Four Poems|Patricia Nelson
Giant
He walks upon the world
as if it were a line, a black one
without width or nuance.
Along the axis of the town,
he steps among the hot and small
who do not love his tall, black eye.
They think the giant watches them,
rakes them with his rank looks,
tastes them with dark wishes.
That he wants to pull them up
like roots or the corners of tents
and carry them away.
But the giant’s eye is rapt and upward,
in a snow of slow, cold stars, a dark
that he lifts gently, like the water in his cup.
It’s only the small who grab at strangeness,
run toward it with loud, ringing feet,
bringing a realization and a death.
Vision of Paradise
Someone is ill and dreams
a gray and fern-soft wind:
The swaying weather of Heaven.
The light of the dream is cool,
holds pale fog and black rock.
moves like the odor of lilies.
The light falls everywhere,
calls animals into bright air.
Animals with shadows that swing,
touching the curve of the animal
and the dark wave of the earth.
Legless animals that slide,
lay long shapes in the dust.
Wolves with oval mouths
pull the undulant moon close.
That’s the way things move
in Heaven. Everything sways
and everything stays.
The Nature of the Pageant
It isn’t real: There is no parade,
no ranking of the dead who rise
from the ground like daffodils.
The pageant is spectacle,
foolish approximation.
Hangs lights as thick as lemons
on the crudeness of your senses.
It touches you with roundness
and a small heaviness.
It is music, an error made
with beautiful instruments.
The intent of the deception softer
than your own voice. More conditional.
It suggests the blue that flies
beyond your simple bluebirds.
It Matters
It matters how a woman is lost,
how her first intention falls
and rises somewhere else.
How the fault can travel
like a color or a cloud
into the death that re-envisions it.
How she untangles the dark, lifts it
by its edges so that even the breakage
has a wholeness and a light.
Photo by Alex Pugliese on Unsplash
BIO:
I have worked for many years with the “Activist” group of poets based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My work has been published in Blue Unicorn, Panoplyzine, The Listening Eye, and other journals. I have a new book of poetry, In the Language of Lost Light, due out from Poetic Matrix Press early next year.
