Gene Tanta

from the manuscript "Unusual Woods"

 

 

XII

 

Someone chased a Grizzly through a forest-fire on TV

but I saw as through jewels, a watered view.

Wide-mouth sunlight rimmed the silver etchings.

I told them to find God in the fields

and on the path to overtake me before I reach Segovia.

The birds in the eaves added up to oak, ash,

but little painted furniture survives.

Later, we fathered an argument near the fireplace.

All morning I had gathered chickpeas in the garden.

After sunset, blindfolded by night,

I suffer the sweet cautery of fashionable men.

Beloved, let me neither bathe nor count my wounds

but toil among the aqueduct stones and hillside workmen.

Gene Tanta

XV

 

Demur as a switchblade, I retract nothing

in the two-way mirror of my itchy eye.

We'll talk

over my footnotes until the pretty flowers

bring flowers. One morning,

the dream crawled down from the attic

into a great scroll of smoke

because a historian has got to eat, write history,

and eat again.

Nodding off at the edge of his deathbed,

lit by the lamp,

he'd like to go upstairs and

shoot you with an antiquated pistol by mistake.

Gene Tanta

XVI

 

Lorine, your faceless dolls await.

In that roadless-dark

the milliner hung herself. The museum photo

fades to black each night.

Black Hawk blood soaked peninsula light,

northern country quite

rides down the river trees

and drinks in the reflection.

Drinks and drinks of it.

In the pilgrim photo

you are all elbows and voiceover

under the passing dressmaker.

I miss you. I carry the longing with me.