Three Poems by Laurie Lamon

This poem doesn’t care about the movie Avatar,

dosen’t care about IPods or Notebooks or

the divorce of reality from reality; it isn’t

thinking of animal shelters, three million plus

deaths per year; this poem isn’t thinking

of oil or children or ice melting with climate

that is here or not here; this poem has nothing

to do with the bodies of women which have

ceased to move on cots or sidewalks; this poem

doesn’t know the legal age of marriage for

girls in Ethiopia, Sir Lanka, Saudi Arabia etc.;

it has stopped looking for the name of the one

killed in a bus by a bomb, in a car by a sniper,

on the path by a tripwire, in a house, in a crib.

This poem isn’t waiting for pain’s reprieve,

for grief to pack up its tools for another heart’s

pale. It is hungry for milk, for the messages

of pillow and sheet; it wants the drowse

of the egg in the open nest, a plain thing, in-

effable brim of shade, yellow apples ripening.

This is damage the body

remembers–

a snowy landscape

Pain swept with one hand.

without landscape black beneath

white without wind without interuption

Pain thinks of still life without charcoal

& seeds without burnish & soil Pain thinks

of iris lapis lazuli light without leaf

without breath Pain thinks of still life

without eternity meeting the air