From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Fri Jun 13 09:00:49 2008 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:49 -0400 Subject: [Realpoetik] Lesley Jenike Message-ID: <86a3fe410806130900l50749183n816d168de738badc@mail.gmail.com> Battle of Bunker Hill Dear Lesley, don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes; shoot when you see; don't shoot before you look: winter scourges the dirt you groomed to bloom hydrangea once May made peace with this Eastern city. Among buds you hung paper stars, bashful, ripped by wind, just shy, by perspective's virtue, of a white obelisk where we hung our collective remembrance. Some battles bleach in sun, field that pillowed men's feet and cradled the stakes they struck to fly their colored cotton, draws up its green. Your face met pavement after an evening; even the greyhound in his quarter, bound on each side by black iron, seemed to understand: war is running. I painted this one for you. The sky is a rainbow of sun and gunfire, the earth is a gunwale. These men are just hanging on, one hour, another. The wilderness in you is ignorance: the smell of your skin, cells' nuclei, the twin poleis of your eyes, a politic. In this Eastern city, anxious men exit trains so you may enter them and bullet yourself to Wonderland where dogs still chase steel, muzzled, mysteriously named, like the hill this battle was named for. It's not the hill where the battle seethed. But I allow myth to dictate. You, too, moving across the track with precision, allow the rabbit to escape. Spring of a New Era Dear Lesley, the lawn has grown long sooner this year. Soon your nieces will be in blades looking for eggs, the yard a treasure. Bound in gold foil, chocolate hares spoil as they hide. I'm reminded of the bullion sun we hunted, hidden among pines or in a marsh regularly filling then draining according to the moon, that lesser, silver aster. The timber it took to build a house was akin to skin stretched by god's hand over scaffolding. In the Age of Reason, we understood. You understand: there's no end to reason. It soaks the room with its harpsichord, its brocade repeating deference in discrete pattern on your lap as you take up your sewing. I wish I could see your hands and hold them up to mine. In the twenty-first century, blonde girls discover egg after egg after discovering the hider's philosophy: behind a tree or beside the wheel of a car. We thought we could predict nature but instead we built a country. It stretched its rationality out like a hand to pluck an egg, pink and blue, from the meadow. Look, there are so many! Sinking into Our We Dear John, the British are coming! Just kidding. They've already come, and long ago, painting Our map with a cream and crimson expulsion >From sun to setting sun, that blessed star, even After so many years, we still imagine comes And goes, sinking into our we. We got it wrong. The sea is just what it advertises: a primordial bubble, its own laws, public gardens, public policy: Whosoever sinks becomes for the lesser that make light at the cellular level, a meal of disproportion, skull of a hull through which schools disappear. Your paintings in the dome, a pitched roof to stop rain ruining, guide our bones through their wreckage, their post-storm compositions so caringly rendered sky opens above. What happens to the dead? You had your opinion and wager: Washington is there eternally hating the color red, a sky forever red. He's the sailor that took the warning: morning happens every day. Looking into the sun of your interpretation, we understood. Lesley Jenike's poems have appeared or will appear soon in Fairy Tale Review, Florida Review, Brooklyn Review, Court Green, POOL, Verse, and others. Her first book Ghost of Fashion is forthcoming from WordPress. She will be joining the faculty at the Columbus College of Art and Design next year. -- RealPoetik realpoetik.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: