Molly Bendall
Consider the Crusades
Given the speed of the seven in a row, I’d say
the skylarks would reach the lake
ahead of the others, intensifying their glee, buckling then,
like that, in a swoop-dare.
From my lookout this vertigo—it’s special,
it’s in my own flesh.
The ladder’s rickety, and that’s when particular life specks
could be left and I could return to a bauble from
way back, where the rusty gate placates me, calming notions.
When I embarked on the outer reaches, on a made-up
star, I too skewered a cyclops.
Our weapons—let’s see that they’re kept dry.
Once the young soldier was hung for desertion,
wearing his farmer’s smock and suede slippers.
Drifting now and all those I might stretch for.
A False Wing
So prompt the holiday
thought. The smash-box
must be a thing for subtleties.
Let your touch
be supposing. Make him be
able to understand dark questions.
Need spangles
to decipher then fall on.
Go modern
with the sugar. Then sixes,
take it in sixes.
Napoleons to trout, not
forgetting the colorful root.
May it all be hung
with globes of light.
Then it can be anyone’s
fool body.
Adventures on a Raft
A jigsaw leaf mumbled down and I thought
last year’s fox would remember me.
I galaxied the whole path for myself—strewn now
with dust drags and celestial spores.
Then the lightning crazies up the street of shops.
I might have been a fraud I’m saying in the bulky air,
too lazy to wish with music.
And I didn’t notice the crowd that had become
a parade no less. It throbbed in crooked time.
In the square the monument of the general in its onyx misery
motioned for me to get moving.
No one could understand such public worries.
The field reached long long behind the tracks
and I could leave the here and now
laugh it into money, send it to the far hood of the mountains.
Molly Bendall is the author of three collections of poetry. Her new volume Under the Quick will be appearing from Parlor Press in 2009. She currently teaches at the University of Southern California.