A Panther In The Snow: The Poems of Mark Sniadecki

[marksniadecki]

Moist Gills

Green beds wetly stung with crickets laced with last year's forgotten seeds.

It's nearly autumn again.

Your calyx cup sewn shut out season rips its stitches.

The rain hunters run to.

A swollen mushroom grows there erect on death.

[marksniadecki]

Letter To A Muse, March 1st, 2011

Darling, your birth canal Is also your grave Where the winter sun is eaten And the earth coughs out a moon.

Your slender bones Draped in placental rose Have done with one rambling, Prepare for the next.

Pretty dead child Of packed daffodils and ivy unfreed You may, in fact, be all I need To remember myself.

Or maybe a wife With a mouth for fire. Anyway, you are a corpse Growing new skin in a rotting box.

I long to part your femurs, Duck through a bare arbor arch Scream and cry back Into the days of open windows.

There beneath a skirt of roots Words that escaped me Drowse naked, Ready to be reclaimed.

[marksniadecki]

“If you ever feel neglected”

Tonights in November populus with stars only glimpsed in the mind mental snow and the warm breath of memory so tonight, on this one with recorded music leaving the speakers monitor glow and a singer incoherent but emotive evoking I tried to become your priest again with your body bundled in confessional wood so the piano so I could love you so many the wasted weeks burning to thaw this foolish hobo’s hand

[marksniadecki]

Icarus Immortal

Death put his hat back on I shipped him away

I sent him to the Sahara He wears a havelock I cover my neck

I have made him more foreign And less legion

Let strangers pop their bullets To explode his porcelain head I am in this war now I am burning every single shred Of white cloth in a hundred leagues

Especially his

He will lose his wretched hourglass In the infinite grains of Time Forget me like a lover

                        Because I will                                keep                                  on                               turning                         it upside down

Until my hand resembles a propeller And I land at Kittyhawk Wax wings intact

[marksniadecki]

Hunter-Doktor

You cannot treat the wounds you make, cannot set the break, the gash opened by your own lash.

The deer denies you to touch the arrow once left your bow, and once dove into her flesh. It is lost for last in the closing grove.

What recourse then, Herr Hunter-Doktor? Torn by desire to clean and mend, you are impotent, dumb and damned to the end.

The poison dripped cannot be cleared, though you burned your viper's hide. It is as you feared:

We cannot even say you tried.

[marksniadecki]

Her Coup

In slips her cadre of heavenly killers: Foot, calf, and naked thigh. My soft assassin's shadowfold Fills the nightly sky. And so I lick my finisher. Parting clouds sigh overhead. My body bleeds its sanest silver When gibbous moons come full to bed.

[marksniadecki]

Gecko Doll

The days fluidly stutter by, The summer creeps to, night on night.

You web your bed From headboard to footboard.

But your body's unblackened, no firefly. No fire wire, burning telephone cord.

Not even a hot cell, Just lonely hell.

Crush your chest to a breathing boulder. Change your flesh before it gets colder.

[marksniadecki]

Feral Urge

Do you love me? The longest claw of a wounding paw, renting you, selling you into slavery, is it me? Tightening your back and covering legs that long to kick free? Kick me to the edge of your precipice, I am snaggletoothed giving permissions to do what you deem unseemly. Morals? They are the bright stripes dividing the shadows that cage me. Are you hungry? I could eat the whole rose. You can confess to your lonely skin but O, my lovely I have always known.

[marksniadecki]

Dreams Of The Mile-High Club

The ant taps the aphid with hard, gentle antennae.

The robot in the box runs to fetch my thin metal bubble of dew.

Is it sad or encouraging to believe that every worker has wings in the closet

when only the royals are copulating at 30,000 feet?

[marksniadecki]

Darjan Soul

Are you just a flickering picture of my longing lust, a shadow under the water's edge? Or the sweet manifestation of my deepest love, gliding through the misty glen?

I know you are not the God above, that bible of the masses here. In my eyes you go against the law, from winter's thaw to summer's leer. From verna's eye to autumn's ear. The tongues that twine year to year.

[marksniadecki]

Darja, Summerwan

She wears the light blue cotton now, a leaf in her cotton mouth, lidded emeralds bowing and rising, her hair and the clouds playful cohorts of the birthing wind.

Breaking dishes and singing.

Even in the best marriage air will slip beneath the ring, between the metal vow and finger. I showed you the way into the room I will never fill.

[marksniadecki]

Concord

You, the Hope diamond, the Star of India, my Louvre, our love everything I thought was impossible to lay between two cupped hands, could never happen: Let me savor this, not like an oasis or disc of candy, but the surface tension of a swollen cherry, or plum or bruise-black grape: a dark bursting yearn of yes against desires. We are clapped into them now, chains of letters, and any celestial record will have to read: She was here, looking at him and there he was, taking her in.

[marksniadecki]

compromised integrity

riddling doubts - worm riven grooves scar pale wood revealed when papery bark falls away to holes in ozone, holy ionospheres stabbed to sawdust - a mighty trunk falls apart where it stands a blinding bright gap in the canopy

[marksniadecki]

Blue Devils (An Apology)

I made snowmen in my heart. Then I made it snow in yours. Now we both need a hearth And a night to talk it all down. It was always a winter's love. You were my kid of Christmas. I proved a fallen morningstar, Sum of your prayers unheard.

[marksniadecki]

Before The Doors Open

A space made for people Devoid of people, Unpeopled, Does not putresce— It echoes like a gelatin ghost Abandoned subway platform. Even a rotting log Is stuffed to its fungal gills With writhing. Morning malls and Midnight churches Weep with the silent absence Of life. I have to believe They will not be kept waiting forever.

[marksniadecki]

Banned Books

Where is the line between us? Chalk to my toe What is your substance? Indelible fluid solidity A strand of molten bubbles Straining thin Or plain of frozen gold Hashmarked, set with barbed wire Green lights screaming stop— Where do you finally put up flags? Where do you reveal the cones? Is there a churning edge, Is there a house I cannot enter, Can I rent one stripe of the forbidden zone?

[marksniadecki]

Autumnland

Sun cloud-eaten blue darkening

Never quite night

Never reached day

Burnt barn roof ridge raven-lined

Diving black cat

Pale heap of hay

Pitchfork pricking dry-chill earth

Dead rows standing

Trees dropping flame

Staring eyes stuffed in crucifixion

My wind-eaten hat

Face burlap sane