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all their characters reflected in my face
by P.J. Nights
as the shuffle of cards
for a pinochle game
the wind begins;
a faint hiss and whistle from the parlor
carrying the secrets of adults after-dark,
from their beds, children strain to listen
*
I started talking to the man
from Mars because he invited it,
there in the café courtyard
he could have painted at home
on his kitchen table -- with his cups
of gray dishwater and his battered tin
but he chose to do so among
the clove-cigarette smokers and iced-tea drinkers --
and the chess players
who also wished to be watched
even in their guarded muteness
over a bishop’s sandpaper slide,
a soft hand-slap on the timer
*
the barometer plunges, frantic air
whips the dog into white-eyed parabolas
through skeleton underbrush
she’s staring at the knees of a giraffe --
it’s bigger than her,
what’s coming
electrons split the sky
*
it began as mere persiflage --
a French banter, a Latin hiss and whistle
I looked over his shoulder
while the Mars-man boxed three separate spaces
with long vertical stripes and horizontal dashes
in the watercolours of a tulip garden
I found freedom in the stares of those
around us as he answered my questions
in the English he'd learned from satellite signals
his spaceship on the bottom
of Boston Harbor,
he couldn't go home
*
ploùra, ploùra, ploùra from the tree frogs
it will rain, it will rain, it will rain
and it does -- cats and dogs and frogs --
over an opaque sugar-cube sky,
this world is not the same as before,
aquarium light transfigures trees
and grasses
into cloudy-green absinthe
the green fairy of Rimbaud -- “certain skies
sharpened my vision”
I can wait but others will run
*
though I'm a terrible liar, perhaps I could
convince myself -- tell a tale so fantastic
that nothing else I do ever surprises
secrets after-dark, after-death,
the children sing
the worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out, the worms
play pea-knuckle in your snout
*
you can cut them into postcards, he'd said,
handing me the sheet of Arches paper
with its trio of rectangular flower plots
I could -- and let loose a shout, full
of what I might say
©2002 by P.J. Nights
P.J. Nights lives in coastal Maine with her family and various pound
pets. She teaches physics and astronomy. Her poetry and stories have
been published on the Web at sites such as Erotica Readers & Writers
Association, Slow Trains, Clean Sheets, The Lightning Bell Poetry
Journal, MiPoesias, Mind Caviar, Ophelia's Muse, and the Writer's
Hood. Her works appear in print in Penumbra, Femme, Artemis, and Slow
Trains Volume 1.
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Slow Trains, Volume 1 in print
