Sample Poems by Daniel Bourne

Covenant

Thunder, the Baltic, Andrzej scattering the swans
with his quick limp, as we bring up the rear
worrying how many people get struck in Poland

each year from lightning. The rain soon pelts,
our skin grows huge as sponges, the sand
wet on top, heavy as our lives, but with each step

we tread down to our dry selves, gray tracks left behind
as if they were our last requests. “Is this when I die,”
we say here in the open, no tree

to stand under or to blame, in the event
of the sin of dying, of getting caught 
in the great mess we swim in. How many vodkas

shared with Andrzej, how many times out on the beach,
afterwards, gazing at the calmness of the ships
heading with their bleak cargo into port

will it take for us to be glad we are alive,
to distrust the rainbow? Not so much
to question it,

but to question us.
The awful fact the rainbow will be,
but we won’t.

Picturing the Disaster


Any moment it can happen. Coming back into town
on the curve around the East Fork Lake
I follow a blue light in the sky over Olney
hovering in perpetual fall. I’m twenty years old,
I've been drinking, and I don't know

if this is a bomb, a UFO, or the great star of Revelations
threatening the earth. No. I’m watching a more
private disaster: the trauma-center helicopter
ferrying between the shores of life and death.
Ten years later I rip open a letter in Warsaw

and read how my Uncle Jerry flipped from his four-wheeler
as he climbed the mud and leaves on a wooded hill, 
the weight of his body falling on his neck like a bomb,
all contact broken with the farms and cities of his limbs .
A miracle he is still alive, a miracle

I am six years old, lifted onto the black metal gas tank,
cradled between Jerry’s strong thighs as we zoom
through Claremont on my first motorcycle ride, the ground
rushing so close beneath my feet I gasp
as if I am falling forever. Even now, I hang suspended

between Poland and Illinois, waiting for the next
bolt of memory, for my uncle to take
his next gulp of air, for the next news from my mother
in her frenzied hand: Coming back into town
on the curve around the East Fork Lake—

 
Recycling


I want to buy a birthday card for my father
dead these ten years. This winter
I’m in Poland. The selection

is not much. I don’t want these
pictures of flowers. The smell of plastic
they laid on his grave. No rhymed verse

in the language I’ve been speaking
in the time since he died. Nothing from
the U.S. works either. Blue hippos
 
with pink eyes, small birds with puns.
“No tree was destroyed to make this card.”
But my father died. And I want to make

something else die for him. At a kiosk
I ask for a plain white card. The paper cut
from a fir tree in Silesia. I send it home

to the address where we lived. I wonder
who will open it. If my father’s ghost
coming in from the cornrows

will tear it from their hands.

 
The Language of the Dead

One of those days when the earth
seems to make its own light, even during a hard rain
the autumn leaves radiant. We have just visited
the grave of a murdered Polish priest. We watched
workmen cut flowers and put them in vases. Later,
we buy postcards in the church kiosk: the battered body
fished out of the reservoir; the village road sign
where he was kidnapped; each photo a station
of the twentieth-century cross. Such a day

weights the earth. When we go home to warm tea,
to the heat of our bodies, the heft of our dictionaries
with their broken spines, we try to break through
to the language of the dead. Tomorrow,
we will shop in the stores, but no one
will acknowledge our presence.


(Warsaw, October 1985)