Ah, what the soul gives for shape ?
         to be handled head-first

at the temple, to be cumbered
         with cotton, white puffs

from plantations in heat;  what it gives,
         for the flick, flick elastic

on wrists, loose-leaf palms it befriends,
         at its youngest ? for the sake

of all this, and this place.
         Love me now with your

hands (says the soul, half-exploring its
         landscape), better me

with embodiment;  come, angle the ribs
         where they beach into

longing;  come, finger the oval description
        of death, smallest hope

for cessation.  When the room is redundant
         of space, and its walls

wish for closure, thumb my corners
         up, inward, wade your lips

through the ridge where they meet,
         to allow recollection.

I must love with the tissue and the gloss
         that embody:  cellule, elegy,

ghost, danger, languish...  all those words
         out of context for souls,

god-forsaken, whiplash of the neck ?
          Interim

is the word I would use the most cautiously;
        how precarious its hum,

ear to earth, plumbing earth, earthwise.

(from A Commerce of Moments, Pavement Saw Press, 2003)
 
 
 

The Tightrope
 

Mid-summer:  a certain temptation
to settle here, before the final

leg of the journey, when the year teeters like an acrobat
in white tights

over a plaza’s netting.
(Days and devils labor inches apart...)

Let’s say we, too, attempt our balance on two stilts,
bone-thin,

with no other crutch,
the way the obsessive artist of August fiestas leaned

on twin álamos for his evenness.
When he built his home, he hollowed double hearths

and a blind threshold to match the east-wing door;
in the silent plot behind the house,

he planted a double ligament of liana
toward a second tomb.

Always in pure duality ?
Let’s say we leave out every thirdness, the odd drone

hovering over a bee-line, the loose tongue
in the uncommon serpent,

threading a  twig...  instead,
we slip into a commerce of moments: one-two,

one-two:  noon gossip for midnight truth,
leaf-lethargy for home.

Two crows have scared the crickets balancing our luck ?
a caw, a pull,

a pause ?
what could, what must become of a life.

Sofia M. Starnes

(from A Commerce of Moments, Pavement Saw Press, 2003)
 Provinces

The Lord is my shepherd…

Imagine a province with nothing you've
owned—shepherds and rucksacks,

mustard and figs, fence-
posts and pastures,valley of death.

  Picture cedars and slingshots, a pocket
of beans, knotted sandals—

further downhill, the pink of a lamb no one seeks.
 In this story (and others) they

tell us of these—an inn and a portico,
temple and dome: upheavals…  the hazardous

eyes of a boy close to swine,
hung jury of a father in drapery robes,

the red
ring he surrenders.

  And the stories have more
of the unknown: a river that licks what is other-

wise dry, the flap of a fishtail
in stone, always food, always given.

  What is it about psalms
that converts them to tales of our weeds,

the brown chickory pulled from our drives,
our blank corrals? What holds

things—consolation, or garden, or hope?
What returns,

blowing over the twilight-gold
pollen we bear to our tombs, ache for angels?

  We have left a dark Plymouth still idling,
our fog on its glass, a pure dent

in the backrest—the little we owned of a father,
a road, old communions.

  Seven times we will wash away grist
from the slab, rub the name, clean-sleeve

over; seven times we'll hear, coming, the bleat
and the scuffle of lambkins.

 Seven times the custodian—
or shepherd—will wait for us, sign for us,

one by one: Hija!  My child…
 Are you lost? Are you tarrying?

(First published: Hotel Amerika)