A Few Prose Poems
She held her secret so long and so close that it worked its way into her capillaries and arteries. Her heart whispered it between beats. Messages grew backward on her fingernails. Her spine tried to twist itself cursive. After many years she died a lonely woman, and it was said that on her grave the flowers sprouted in cryptic hieroglyphs.
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Tonight I committed suicide with a cap gun. I breathed the firecracker smoke as I worked to decipher the blot of corn syrup and dye that spattered the wall behind me. After hours of second- and third-guessing, I concluded that the picture was an unmistakable image of a lonely sailor staring across an infinite sea.
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A stack of Russian nesting dolls. As you split open each tiny body, a smaller one emerges. Soon you have to trace the edges with your fingers. A few more and only through a magnifying glass can you examine each figure’s black eyes and red cheeks. Your friend at the laboratory lends you the use of an electron microscope so that you can open the last of the little wooden people. Inside, insignificant even magnified two million times, is their culture’s rarest and most valuable treasure-emptiness.
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Tonight I committed suicide with a cap gun. I breathed the firecracker smoke as I worked to decipher the blot of corn syrup and dye that spattered the wall behind me. After hours of second- and third-guessing, I concluded that the picture was an unmistakable image of a lonely sailor staring across an infinite sea.
---
A stack of Russian nesting dolls. As you split open each tiny body, a smaller one emerges. Soon you have to trace the edges with your fingers. A few more and only through a magnifying glass can you examine each figure’s black eyes and red cheeks. Your friend at the laboratory lends you the use of an electron microscope so that you can open the last of the little wooden people. Inside, insignificant even magnified two million times, is their culture’s rarest and most valuable treasure-emptiness.