Two Poems
The Last Fire Engine From Hell
1
Fire splashed up at us. What looked like snow or ashes were scraps of paper on which good deeds had been recorded. The fireman remembered it as a turquoise building, with its pants around its ankles. Someone had covered the holes in the screen with electrical tape, but night still got in. We held each other. The fireman raised his axe. No amount of coaxing could get the canary lying on the bottom of the cage to sing.
2
As soon as I enter you, monarchies and condors, music for pieces of wood. There's only one law, you say, the law of unintended consequences, but say it so softly I only imagine I hear it. And then we untangle, and the migrants on the hill, who had paused to watch a cloud shaped like Asia Minor, return to gathering windfall apples under blind, embittered branches.
The Reference Librarian Of Arcane Griefs
Who knows when
she went down
to the evening dimness
of the stacks,
but now she stands
with her flabby back to us,
slowly turning the pages
of a long treatise
on melancholy
and quietly weeping.
Anyone would think
it was she herself
who misshelved
the books we needed.
What about the burning curtains?
I want to ask her. And what
about the parking lot filled
with abandoned babies?
She doesn't look up,
but if she did,
she might see planes
like silver crucifixes
and a few tiny, gray clouds
scattered like the debris
of some distant confusion.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 10 poetry chapbooks, including Visiting the Dead (2009) from Flutter Press. His first full-length collection of poetry, Lovesick, has just been published by Press Americana. For more information, visit: americanpopularculture.com.