Sjögren’s Syndrome
Anything
begins with water:
the mouth of the Euphrates,
villages, city-states,
empires,
all our ideas
gathered, passed
down, one place,
another, now
and later.
And stays alive
as well: cell,
tributary, heart.
The body
a creek bed thirsty
for a few drops
to roll eyeballs around in,
to swallow so naturally
air is gourmet.
Surface leaves, twigs,
plants dried up like the
privates,
their ache for this element.
The need not to always reach
deeper.
Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review
Anomalies
…for everything flowers from
within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is
necessary
to reteach a thing its
loveliness…
—Galway Kinnell
In the endless mall of
Florida—a French patisserie run by French people.
Birds flit for crumbs.
Sherbet umbrellas beckon Town
Cars of the aged to dock nearby.
Scents of hibiscus,
sunset-hued blossoms of tropical vines blend with that of yeast, humid asphalt,
and Estée Lauder.
There is no one left to
love.
Sometimes the evidence is
overwhelming.
Sometimes I wish a gull will
miss landing on its piling.
The real truth is that
nothing mitigates.
Lonely birds call through a
pink dusk.
If I could name the flora and
fauna, I could cope with uncertainty.
I could walk outside to a
gator in the pool.
Surprising things
happen.
A double murderer was just
arrested in Chicago where he’d lived as a poet for twenty years.
I have to write so many words
just to survive.
How many will it take to
endure? To be happy?
The many places I’ve been
make me like every place less.
I love the romantic excess of
Spanish explorers: cities of gold, fountain of youth.
Here the old grow younger or
think they do.
Who am I to shadow
conquerors?
Sometimes a clean, well-lighted
place is fine.
Sometimes nothing is
enough.
Always that restlessness in
the stalls.
The need to be touched.
The need to be reminded of my
loveliness.
As if I am one of the few who
are chosen.
Carlos Fuentes described
Frida Kahlo with her jangling jewelry and intensity as her own opera.
At times I am so tame I
wonder if even the trained can prepare me for a return to the wild.
At times the Leo in me sees
the world as collateral.
A woman in a poem hopes in
the growth of two dozen seeds.
The man thinks she expects
too much: “To grow her a whole new life.”
What can I expect here beside
the ocean?
I do not ponder the damage
done—a cul de sac of regret.
Loss.
Not everything happens for a
reason.
I hear orchids grow in wet seclusion.
Stones are silent by
choice.
Water builds only to lose
itself.
Blue calms my tendency to
wander, to see other sides.
Life, like anything, is a
habit, can be found almost anywhere, can happen to anyone.
Published in RHINO.
Steep Coast
There’s love and there’s painting and we only have one heart.
—Edgar Degas
How can I not repeat, as each gesture of the living does?
The aureole of Paris, fluid
sleights of a pas de deux,
a racehorse against air. A crumpled handkerchief is a cloud,
towel draping a chair in
light—translucence,
day glow not true as
gaslight. A back bends, twists—
I know the animal, the desire
to be—without sense.
Girls in tulle and tricot are
trees, a forest of hesitations, starts.
Generations of the same
movements and they still matter,
like the fatigue of the
absinthe drinker, the flow of hair groomed in silence—
no water more lovely—brush on
a vanity, waiting. Memory is
landscape.
I do not aim for fields or
windy spaces. A collection of hats is my
bouquet.
My heart was never a pouch of
faded, pink satin.
A cliffside yielded her
beautiful shoulders.
After years of drawing,
sculpting bodies, I find my love alongside the sea,
exposed,
seen by anyone, being born into an old world, complete.
Marc J. Frazier has been widely
published in journals including The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Caveat
Lector, Ascent, Permafrost, Plainsongs, Poet Lore, Rhino, and Evansville Review. He is
the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry. He is the author of
The Way Here, a full-length poetry
collection, and two chapbooks The Gods of the Grand Resort and After. His second full-length
collection, Each Thing Touches, is
now available from Glass Lyre Press or on Amazon. He has led numerous workshops
and participated in poetry readings in the Chicago area for many years. His
website is www.marcfrazier.org.
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