Two Poems by Zachary Kluckman

Two Poems by Zachary Kluckman

Forgiveness is a Small Boat

You were         almost

A silk-worms’ favorite leaf

Once

Almost             delicate

Slender wristed

As the throat of those orchids

We talked about planting at Christmas

But you could never catch rain

That’s how I knew we were doomed

The heart is a drunken architect

Full of blue prints          and sky scrapers

No one understands his designs

When you danced naked

Through the tawdry office of my mind

Upsetting the furniture

Teaching the windows

                        to sing like wine glasses

At Hollywood weddings

You were the rain

All throaty laughs and light touches

You were the leaves    dancing over concrete in fall

Red eyed and wicked

Waiting for someone to jump in

I was a leaf gatherer

Chasing these widows of spring

Pressing lovers into bed sheets

The way maple folds against the spine

Of old journals  biting at the bindings

A canvas topped Samson

Loose in the city           assaulting bookstores

With the jawbone of an ass

Stolen from a farmer’s field

Freeing poems trapped like hungry birds

In the back of old books

You were         almost              delicate

I was rebellious, a bee in the window

Your eyes could never quite close

Somewhere in Albuquerque there is a church

That remembers the prayers of our feet

In that church there is a closet

Where we almost committed a sin of impatience

A broom that has seen you naked

And a flowerbed where I buried our vows

When you weren’t looking

As this earth is my witness

You were the rain

I have stood naked inside of you

Surprised by your violence

The Sun is a Bug on the Windshield

…the sunset

stays in my windows.

I have trapped it there

with a brush

painting each color’s portrait

with the eager optimism

of a sinner

seeking salvation,

with the quick hands

of a junkie,

convinced that rainbows are prisons.

Water based prisms

making marionette’s of the spectrum.

Colors suspended

by their own lack of faith,

with the skepticism

of a father, with no home

for his children

convinced the sky

has slit its wrists,

opened the veins in a display

meant for the sun.

A mean ex-lover

whose affairs with the trees

gave birth to the shadows

where my mother was born,

sculpting mud for a son

she named carelessly

under the bright,

melancholy suicide of dusk.

Author's Bio: Zachary Kluckman is the Spoken Word Editor for Pedestal Magazine, Director of the Albuquerque Slam Poet Laureate Program and a regional director for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change movement. His poetry appears in print and over 500 radio stations worldwide. A Pushcart Prize nominee, his recent publications include The New York Quarterly, Memoir (and) and Cutthroat among others. When he is not untangling string cheese, Kluckman is hard at work on a new manuscript titled “Those Dust Shouldered Ghosts”.