Two Poems

LOVE POEM BEGINNING WITH TWO LINES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON

Time hovers o’er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy
Saint Augustine said he only knew
what time was if he didn’t have to explain it.
Lucille Clifton wrote “time is another name for God”
in a poem called “rust.”
I think time zigzags like a violin.
I think time hisses
out of my watch like a gas.
I once read a poem that began “Shut up”
and continued, “to be alone is to be alive.” If time
is the sound of God’s scorched laughing,
then we will wrinkle like eels in Maryland’s great Gunpowder River.
If silence really is a way of knowing, I know I have to start over.

***

THERE IS A PROVERB ABOUT THE THIEF CAUGHT STEALING DURING A FIRE

Kathryn says these are the things that give hope: a white dog in the snow howling at the train gone by 

Sei Shonagon says these are the topics of poetry: The capital. The kudzu vine. The water burr. Horses. Hail. 

They say a jellyfish once slid down the throat of a famous swimmer

They say if you have things you only worry about them

My father was born in the 59th most polluted city in the world 

My mother told me she wished she could go away

In poem XIII, Catullus invites his friend Fabullus over to dinner but requests that Fabullus bring all the food, wine, women, salt, laughter

Catullus cites his poverty, his “little purse filled only with cobwebs”

Sometimes your wolf becomes another wolf

Sometimes your sister, a different sister

I was told to avoid eating certain foods in lonely places 

I was told to “carry some metal,” not to step on bone or hair or human ash 

There is a proverb about drowning in two inches of water 

I, too, have something in me like a gun

I, too, live in the remote wilderness of Antarctica

There is a proverb about the thief caught stealing during a fire

How he will be placed into the fire as well