Some things can never be the same
about
all of you compared to all of
myself,
such as the stars we were born
underneath.
I was birthed in the year of the
sheep
and under the constellation
Virgo.
I had a girlfriend who was into
stars,
but just the astrology side of
it.
She told me every day over the
phone
how well Cancers and Virgos got
along
but it always sounded like quite
a stretch.
Our signs were not meant to
collaborate.
It’s clear Virgos were meant for
Capricorns
and live to hate the free flowing
Pisces.
I had endless evidence for Pisces
and why everyone should hate them
also.
My dad never stopped yelling at
us all
and despised our leisurely
activities.
Was he born under the shape a
fish?
Absolutely! But he has anything
but a free, go with the flow
attitude.
My childhood friend was also a
fish
and loyally supported me through
years.
Ah! An exception, you must be
thinking.
No, we got to high school and she
changed.
She spread rumors about me and my
boyfriend.
I vowed not to trust a Pisces
again.
Years later, I tried to trust
someone new.
Only a few days ago she revealed
the close date of her
twenty-fifth birthday,
right at the beginning of the
third month.
_________________________________________________________________
The Bridge by Lisa Jarnot
That there are things that can
never be the same about
my face, the houses, or the sand,
that I was born under the
sign of the sheep, that like
Abraham Lincoln I am serious
but also lacking in courage,
That from this yard I have been composing
a great speech,
that I write about myself, that
it’s good to be a poet, that I look
like the drawing of a house that
was pencilled by a child,
that curiously, I miss him and my
mind is not upon the Pleaides,
that I love the ocean and its
foam against the sky,
That I am sneezing like a lion in
this garden that he knows
the lilies of his Nile, distant
image, breakfast, a flock of birds
and sparrows from the sky,
That I am not the husband of
Cassiopeia, that I am not
the southern fish, that I am not
the last poet of civilization,
that if I want to go out for a
walk and then to find myself
beneath a bank of trees, weary,
that this is the life that I had,
That curiously I miss the sound
of the rain pounding
on the roof and also all of
Oakland, that I miss the sounds of
sparrows dropping from the sky,
that there are sparks behind
my eyes, on the radio, and the
distant sound of sand blasters,
and breakfast, and every second
of it, geometric, smoke
from the chimney of the trees
where I was small,
That in January, I met him in a
bar, we went
home together, there was a lemon
tree in the back yard,
and a coffee house where we stood
outside and kissed,
That I have never been there,
curiously, and that it never was
the same, the whole of the
island, or the paintings of the stars,
fatherly, tied to sparrows as
they drop down from the sky,
O rattling frame where I am, I am
where there are still
these assignments in the night,
to remember the texture
of the leaves on the locust trees
in August, under the
moonlight, rounded, through a
window in the hills,
That if I stay beneath the pole
star in this harmony of
crickets that will sing, the bird
sound on the screen,
the wide eyes of the owl form of
him still in the dark,
blue, green, with shards of the
Pacific,
That I do not know the dreams
from which I have come,
sent into the world without the
blessing of a kiss, behind the
willow trees, beside the darkened
pansies on the deck beside
the ships, rocking, I have
written this, across the back of the
sky, wearing a small and yellow
shirt, near the reptile house,
mammalian, no bigger than the
herd,
That I wrote the history of the
war waged between the
Peloponnesians and the south,
that I like to run through
shopping malls, that I’ve also
learned to draw, having been
driven here, like the rain is
driven into things, into the
ground, beside the broken barns,
by the railroad tracks,
beside the sea, I, Thucydides,
having written this, having
grown up near the ocean.
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