Brass Bowl

brass bowl: the ghost of bruises:
her arms inside his coat


strike the brass bowl
with a tooled
wooden
peg

Tibetan
the maker
signed in red
the inside of the bowl

it is not meant for rice
or water or pennies
tossed at the foot
of a mendicant

it is meant
to be sounded
to be struck softly
to call you to attention

how just this moment
the ringing slowly
flows back into
the skin of it

a brass bowl
blood of the maker
inside & having been struck
its soul reverberates & then the long return;

the journey of the brass bowl

* * *

snow falling into gray surf
he hammers driftwood

or how she chops
green onions

a sharpness
of small

distant
things

& the world
ended years ago

they heard about it
on the radio: the urgency

of things falling apart
the tidal waves & epidemics

nuclear winter & mass extinctions
the kitchen windows clouded but light

still filtered thru the mornings like thin milk
& what they said into the wells when the stars

began to crack & the moon streamed down thru holes
in the sky like white scars—razors of rain—
her hair unbraided

these things we cannot say—
the days that seep away
how she said this is enough now & now & now

she cuts a finger & does not bring it to her lips
how he looks up into the yellow light

a seagull pulling at a dead fish
the winter has been hard;

the sharpness of small things:
a politics of scale

* * *

what he cannot remember
the ghosts of wrens
eating from his
red palms

the first
stuttering
of snow on
the day he died

or how she slept
with her arms
inside his
coat

how he said
to laugh is
to know
sorrow

from the inside
out or what
an aching
wants

to say how
certain loves
are more lonely
for having been so

very hard
or how she kissed
him like he was already bruised
his skin softly burning away her sad distance;

undressing she remembers his hands:
weaving light from the winter seas


Richard Lance Williams

Posted over on More Poetry