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Mark Czanik

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Two Poems For Kasamira

Magician

I leave you sitting on my desk
in your magician’s hat,
reading The Princess and the Pea
in pidgin to invisible Emily.
I got to work! I got to work! you say,
when I try to interrupt.

I mope the house, avoiding you,
conducting the creak of floorboards
from one room to the next,
the huff and puff of a kettle.

Come back to find you climbing
a slope of notebooks,
the crooked nib of a pen dowsing the page.
A ring somewhere under the tablecloth
you’ll wave a wand for soon.

 

Fertility Stone

Your mother and I crawled nine times
through the hoop of Men-an-tol,
lost ourselves in a mist looking for the barrow
of the Seven Maidens of Boskednam.

She found the way, brought us back
to the half-moon tent, where we slept
with our eyes open, each dreaming
of stepping over snakes on the coastal path.

Until somehow we are here.
She finding the paths I have dug over,
almost lost, scraping between beds
to sever the last summer weeds.

You, crouched under the bay tree
where centuries ago I buried the afterbirth,
lifting the promise of sticks and stones,
turning woodlice on the hoop of your hand.

 

Page(s) 26-27

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