At Sea
He is in the water, legs kicking
like horses.
The water is joyous
spinning around him its ribbons.
The sky benevolent and vast.
Floating on his back he follows its curvature
until he loses his balance.
Under the surface he hears the creaking of ships
shifting in their sleep
and the echo of whale song.
He feels his sorrows sink down to the bottom
tied to him still like so many anchors
yet weightless, and thinks
As long as I’m here
nothing can get me.
Fires could blaze and ravage the land.
I’d watch it burn.
Bathroom
The lungs of the bathroom are filled with light
and the breathing is clear.
The light seems even to give a light of its own
you feel you wade in it
as in bathwater
and the falling sound of bathwater when a body lifts
suddenly out.
Sometimes in a bathroom the drain hole looms large,
as large even as the death of a child. Sound seems hollowed by it.
As does hope.
That is the case here.
Light infuses each fixture – the sink, the faucet, the mirror –
but the pipes run in the walls and in the floor, conveying
an absence that pricks the light as space is pricked by time.
Each morning the light pools in as before
and the breathing is clear.
But a hole looms
like a moon full on the horizon.
Human Behavior
Black ops burst on the scene.
Their intelligence gathering had long not been remembered
vestigial structures with no loss of function
the fearful surgery of airstrikes.
No one is sure why this is happening
like dolls they discover their placement in kitchens and bedrooms
on a tide of wine that darkens the brain’s water.
Each one seems to him and herself smaller
locked in the danse macabre
the sky receding and the animals taking shelter.
There is ironic intimacy in the struggle.
Can it be only hate that sustains the gridlock of this embrace?
The mind like heat steadily and recurrently rises out of the body
to survey the scene, take reprieve, and glimpse through a temporal capillary
kiln-fired plates bursting against the wall.
The tragic mask writhes in the grotesquery of its contractions
as a new moon squeezes through the gaping maw
and its pearlescent meniscus ascends the quiet apex.
Potsherds refresh the tree of love
and the sex is like warm summer rain.
Petroglyphic
Lying in bed under layers of blankets
our tired masses melt in the warmth
two prongs of a fork stuck into the night.
The lumbering seeker in vain tries to find us.
I hear him treading in the wrong direction
completely off track, and fidget.
Swept up in the swirling currents of darkness
gravity loses its grip
and doors of perception swing open.
I listen to your breathing
and make us two rowers
moving as one upstream.
In the final flicker of gray dim light
I scratch a love poem
on the cave wall of my mind.
Then the black tide floods in.
—
Originally from Long Island, Matthew Homan currently lives in Atlanta and teaches philosophy at Kennesaw State University. His poetry has previously appeared in Literary Laundry.
