.................................
Like Heliotrope on This Key
.................................

Ships crown the encircling sea.
We climb easily,
see blossoms where there are none.

Anadems proceed logically
from the corona of a girl.

Bright fruit falls to tangoing squirrels. Oh,
the privilege of it all --

gathering definitions of sun.
We correlate them.

During this vacation, we weave splendor.
It dissipates in the commerce of occasion,
ravels stars like flowers.

 
.................................
Yes, Walking
.................................

Manatees lurk in the shallows.
Postcards are posed;

pictures are retouched. Fish jump
alongside the walkway. They're not winged.

Smooth, coated with brine, skin corresponds
with air; temperature, with a body of dynamic sun.

Waves scallop and strew the sand
with seashells, seashells, seashells.

Blown glass has perfect heft.
Mermaids are only adequate when held.

 
.................................
Hours
.................................

When she wakes, she sings
matins from a book covered in scarlet velvet.
Words frame night revels.
  She has memorized the prayers.
The siren draws sailors to their favorite waters,
though her store of wine is vinegar.
  Pretty as a Vermeer, she fills a picture
with gold compacts and burgundy wallpaper.
She oozes engine honey.
  Her fetters are saffron-dyed
garter belts; her skin, like rice
in a begging bowl. The habit remains:
brushing grease from her lips, then licking her fingers,
she drops her hands to her lap,
tricked in gauds.

 
.................................
Yellow Girl
.................................

Milk with honey.
Yellow velvet
radiant as a hundred thousand hillside poppies.
Warm rain rinsing pollen from tanned shoulders.
Sweaty hands grasping dandelions.
Amber bottle terrariums
fragrant and clean with no sulfur: purple and rich red.
Mute bones, still marrow.

She is ivory, not chased with gold, but deep with age.
Encompassing body, she's vermiculite,
mica: light as she enlivens.

 
.................................
Depicted
.................................

Clear silken skin
makes her a model
abundant as any extremity.
As if from within, her beauty opposes
glinting snow or quartz, compares

to fabric beneath portraits
fashioned from fruit,
or to fauna. Stretched taut,
she's absorbing,
refuses to fragment, defies paint.

 
.................................
At the Frontier
.................................

This woman of slapped together wants
breathes less air than satisfies her.
Each intake reminds her of some breach,
some leaven her life won't sustain.

She bites her cheeks,
flips her fingers on the table
this and this and this,
leans into the tripod
and extends her left,
her fingers lengthening,
and she is
hungry.

She's making her way
to a cold drift,
where she'll crawl
inside some carcass
to sleep, too near home
to know how to get there.

 
.................................
Girl with a Gold Heart
.................................

Midas

Less than worthless,
possessed
as leaves tangled in her hair
of beauty,
she was loud as gold
swept by sun
filtered through crackling birded branches.

Stilled,
her feet stain the lawn,
warmth fled as she.
The park persists.

There is no having.

Tin Man

Alders and oaks make her church;
sunset, cathedral;
rocks and worms, cairn.

An eccentric
but awkward woman,
in her confusion, has given
a morass of banging and clanging.

Smith

She was seated on a well-wrought park bench,
leaning open armed against the back rest.

Pollen rides the air away from flowers.

Last light falls amber to the ground.
Andirons glow.
Shoes scatter the bed of hay and wool.

.................................
Catherine Daly
.................................

 
Copyright © Catherine Daly
March 1998

...several poems by Shawn Walker in this room...
where we keep the souls
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