Free Lucky Me by Fred Simpson Page A

love;
    enzymes throwing flares
    for Archimedes.
    Even Proust, endorphin-poor,
    was gifted sparks of stinging joy
    from chemistry – atom-rich
    lit-words;
    while Einstein
    had a Bunsen in his brain.

E ARTHQUAKE
    I was dreaming
    when she broke her plate, dreaming
    fragmentally, coupling infant and old, smelling
    sugar burning and my father’s gorgonzola,
    resigned, primed - and she shook me
    less than she did
    the chimneys. Already
    I was underground!
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â It was easy then
    to offer my sprung neck with the dying
    calm of a trapped gazelle – even
    with froth.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â But as suddenly she stopped (like
    Daniel’s lion) and chance was gone.
    There was no end
    and no substantial harm.
    I had to find my shoes – perhaps a comb – and
    follow them down, down,
    until we hurried out to
    reach the sanctuary of night.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â I looked up, up
    at the frozen stars,
    and focused on the cluster that

    warmed me all those years ago.
    I thought that they might know,
    from their vantage point, whether
    I was riding on a blue, revolving hearse, whether
    they could cut me free.

S INCE T HEN !
    I have always trusted in silence
    To explain. No, perhaps not always but
    Rather since the present never is and words
    My mouths have uttered have uttered up a fence;
    Since then!
    I should have known from boyhood
    When lemons shared were sweet, when
    Chicken talk cut silent for a nimbus or a
    Hawk. Then, of all times, I should have understood;
    Since then!
    As when the desperate bucking stopped and
    Slowing calm brought sorrow joy and now
    Was palpable as passing air and we were poised
    As one. That was when to mute and make a stand;
    Since then!
    Or even now when now is not and Helen
    Leaves with planes arriving, leaves us Paul to take
    The driving, I must entrust the gone to silence
    To still the peptide hurt of when;
    Since then!

T HREE
Sevenths

B IRCH S EED
    No secret can be kept from flung birch seed when
    the wind is up to it, when the irascible wind bends
    Frost branches till they cower low,
    holds them so, then
    lets them go.
    Like Roman catapult it sends
    the seed, like crazy grain it scatters round,
    like whale sperm it sprays the ground;
    and we are left to stop the nose
    to wax the safe before it knows.
    But still it penetrates the darkest, darkest spot,
    where mould stays moist, where archived thought not
    folded in and hidden like a blush, not
    coded locked, may find that it has won and we have got
    no secret kept, no secret yet that we can take
    from flung birch seed when the summer blows,
    when it really blows, and flowers break.

G UY F AWKES
    Exempt, absorbing blue,
    devoid of all but filtered light,
    the sky looked down
    impartially, and drew
    the faintest veil over night.
    It witnessed, without
    affect, and without the
    prerogative of right,
    a bird attached to fireworks
    take flight, explode,
    and then ignite.

M OTHER A ND C HILD
    Staring from an oscillating face,
    unprotected and pocked
    by the arrows of expanding time,
    the moon has no memory
    of birth. It was burst from the
    belly of a blasted earth, and held,
    umbilically,
    by a mother’s mysterious force.
    She of course is losing
    her grip, but imperceptibly,
    (her foetus won’t snap free):
    She’s tilted with pride
    and drugged by monotonous spin.
    It will take an infinite warp till
    she sees his face
    recede with the diminishing
    pull of the tide.

T HE T OSS
    If Death insisted that you choose
    between breathing out and breathing in
    harmonicas would argue that you couldn’t lose,
    flutes that you couldn’t win;
    but harps would say that you need no breath,
    would see no gain from either choice,
    for they have donned the shrouds of Death
    and stay suspended in its voice.

A CT T WO
    The moon subsumes the sun,
    surreptitiously, like a phagocyte
    a mite, dimming day into night,
    using tentacle, not bite,
    choosing fear before fright