HEARTH

My feet
flat on linoleum
became cold, blunt, realized
in expressions of the lost
which meant I stood
outside their prison walls
looking for a hearth
though the imagined warmth
was masquerade comfort
and so my cold feet
lit like candles at the end
of two bones
told me, Walk, walk, Gordon, walk.

- Gordon Hilgers

SLEEP

Sleep. Today was a dream.
A little sugar melts in the rain
yet the sweetness? This stays
like the buttons of your blouse
unbuttoning, then fastening
then placed away again, dark, deep
yet held even in the curbsides
as the busses splash by me
and I'll taste but a little, dreaming
as if this day was only sleep.

- Gordon Hilgers

TO THE DARK ANGELS, RAPPING

Two angels, imagining themselves
into this life like wordless movie extras
bring up their suspicious journeys through the night
though this stood up more solidly
once memory moved them to speak.
No one was listening anyway, one said
but I blew out that candle at least twice
and she lit it again and again
too busy to notice breeze from the door
might have been my wing.

The angels. They knock as if to prod you:
By the telephone, from inside the dresser drawers
once or twice upon the window pane
or the wall, a falling potted plant, the props
at hand. Dark angels. Too shy to reveal their faces.

Then the other one muttered about unemployment
here in the No Man's Land of Science
carried about a literalistic city
like a cheap whore.

I also tried calligraphy, the first continued
yet these teenaged Latinos just can't spell.
I've been commenting on chaos
for years now, and all anyone sees
are the scribbles. If I could only tell someone
that I held the hands that wielded spray paint
or that language is such a poor vehicle,
the message might have made it.

Two dim angels, drinking cheap Texas red
in a dive somewhere, anywhere, far from here
and farther from the dark tables
and it's deathly sad when they begin
to speak about women.

- Gordon Hilgers