Sample Poems by Naton Leslie
Falling Apart
Creates two true centers about
which circle now twin lives
like the pull of double stars,
our memories dividing, shared
mitochondria now subsetting,
an abacus pulling itself apart
as it slips through the count.
You can leave by different doors
if that helps. Even furniture
we buy in backroad second hand
stores soon splits in dry winter
heat, buckles from the rude use
of the guise of veneer left
fallow in the barn loft where
it has been allowed to loaf since
someone died a decade ago,
when her imprint slept on
in trace and scent of talcum,
pins and buttons slipping
into cracks between drawers.
And the worst thing you can do
to the neck of a guitar is play
the delta blues, stretch strings
into the cave of the palm, spider
the fret board to the bottom.
I warp the reeds of a harmonica,
late nights on the porch, tunes
silted in fifteen dollar scales,
into the slow wail, breaking out
notes into ninety others, into
sighs, gestures, signals, myth,
the death entropies of the animal,
even my heartbeat as it jazzes,
a center of muscle and blood only,
tapping a backbeat for the dance
of what can be held together.
Stand Fast
To see all humanity I should dress in black,
jump to the front of speed in all forms,
projectiles, a chance
at rally against war,
it doesn't matter which, and
there find a man striding
up, puffed with his own
knowledge, and loving
to strike me for the nation.
He flexed back,
fierce, not a flinch,
and I asked him for a light for my cigarette.
No, sorry, he said in like reflex,
I don't smoke.
I thanked him and his fist dropped
as denied men do.
I am vulnerable to wind
as it persuades me this, tells me
that, and I believe
the storm, always have believed
the violence of storm high in trees,
made honest in rain, the lightning
forces the clouding to truth or
the point-blank shedding of hail.
The Saint Alive
I do not know the certain shape of things
beyond the touch of my hand on the free heat
of a fevered face, the shiny toe of the statue
of Saint Anne de Beaupre in a cathedral
in Northern Quebec polished by the legless
uncontrollable holy who surely cast their
hugged crutches down and fall, having walked
that brief moment from the touch of toe
to the granite floor. Outside, another figure
of Jesus climbs the hill to his death
of deaths. The walls of that cathedral are covered
by a manuscript of grave devices, the canes
and crutches claimed by the spirit of the toe
of a plaster saint. The toe is rubbed past
the artist's color and shape of nail.
It does not look like flesh.