“I have/a secret pigeon in my heart./I keep it in a cage composed of object lessons and feed it/moral law.”
The Elegant Trogon
The South American trogon
is a gentle bird with weak legs
and soft colorful feathers.
It nibbles holes in trees
to make its nest. One flew
into my sleep and dropped
a golden tooth into my supinated
hand, then perched croaking
on a twig. It appeared
to be wearing spectacles.
Special effects, said an Eastern
Elusive Spadefoot Toad,
digging calmly as a scholar
of the Era of Good Feelings.
I felt a rictus travel across
my face, arriving at my mouth
in the form of an effortful
grimace. Dawn was carrying
something quantum in its oral
cavity and purring. I have
a secret pigeon in my heart.
I keep it in a cage composed
of object lessons and feed it
moral law. Every morning
it stirs and wakes me with
its lonely cooing and together
we wander into a sort of
guilty state of already feeling
as if we are at loggerheads
with the turtle of doing what
we ought to do. Now I am
fully awake. Still I feel that golden
lodestone burning in my palm.
Which I plan on keeping locked.
Poem for Robert Desnos
you were born in a butcher shop
owned by your father an addled ghost
who might have also run a tavern
the tablets are unclear
the fly buzzed unhappily in the doorway
it wanted to tell the world
and the sun delayed setting for an hour
across the ocean it was Independence Day
and a new millennium saw the buffalo
dying out on the endless plains
no one in the Marais
knew the world had changed
everyone talked softly
about yesterday and poured
too much emerald liquid into glasses
beveled and reflecting the sea
though it was thousands of years away
caressing the stone docks of Marseilles
and the flagstones bloomed
much further east the Black Madonna
with her miraculous powers
waited patiently for your arrival
the black geometry of her face
the gorgeous abstraction
of her scars as she holds the child
holding a box of unknown reliquaries
with her actual tears in the dark green forest
she saved Bright Mountain
now she cries only when she is alone
so no one but you can gather the liquid
full of tiny silver clouds
for now in the butcher shop
the baby sleeps and outside
under sinister chimneys wraiths
of knowledge walk toward the door.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September, as well as Why Poetry, which was released with Ecco/Harper Collins, and Story of a Poem, which was released with Unnamed. He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
