Sample Poems by Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Poem without Hands
The idealist's question would be
something like: What right have I not
to doubt the existence of my hands?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
It would like stepping onto glass, unbroken sheets
to oval per instruction as a pony takes shape
in matchbook covers that would teach you how to draw.
But the mazed, concentric hoops of blunt desire
you've penciled, like so much bangle on your wrists,
resist the sudden transformation: no living animals
move from off these lines, their poor mathematics.
Without touch, far better the ivory slippers you have found
sleepwalking on water, slipping out beneath your robe
until you've reached the stairs and wake. A ship
inside a bottle, you stretch your arms against the walls
going down into the dark. You know the paintings hung
on the landing you can't see, but none of them are yours.
And what you must not do: reach out as you step down,
brush along the wooden frames and close your eyes,
stop here, put your too smooth fingers to your lips.
At the Beach Near Teaneck
Put down the stars
as angry villagers whose madman's gone
to Paris, torch light
following the carriage, small grenades
of sound. This is not
just any sky above the sea, comfort made
of sand which cannot stop
its hands. And no virtual vacation,
but real, figured seaweed
just below the surf, salad in a warm ice-chest,
a flashlight pointed
down: some three-legged dog, collar bright
with rhinestones, bobbing
like a seal. Here's the lap gone cold, alcohol.
Impossible to salve
these nerves, a bad sunburn, curtains
opening, the puppet
with a club stepped out. How the eyelids
drop, the elbows
pop and wag, the mouth hinged up and down.
Human talk. Or
the dark wall near this bed, and later:
like a horse that dreams
erect, clops across the deck. It stings.
The leather branches
snap. This head inside a glassy cube,
distant howling at my back.
Pieta
Midday, and already night comes on.
The woman holds her child in her
arms, a shadow at the margins of her face
twisted into columns toward the sky.
The storm is almost here. If it were
only lightning, only solid wind--
but she's the cracking world,
her son inside her useless arms.
Those who stand around her move
their mouths like chairs, soundless
aliens. Men with cufflinks tell her
they haven't seen death's white room
and scourge. They lie. Her only child
dies. What little light there is
drops a cage around whatever isn't him:
the waxen sheets, flowers drenched
in chrome. She holds her child
in her arms. A little while
and nothing she can say, but close
her eyes against his hair, draining
from her hands, almost moths at the corners
of her eyes, the coolness spreading in his flesh.
Her son, her only child is gone.
She holds the ruined phoenix in her lap.
He will never in her lifetime burn.
Girl with Captured Fireflies
Tips her head back? Water
and, above her, moon:
quaint body, jar.
A far soul on fire
at each candlewick,
fingertip. Prophetess,
her small laughter:
these coals burn her tongue.