Sarah Sarai, "2 Poems"

Sarah Sarai

Are the Roses Doing Nothing?

It could be an eel is not a trope
(oh?) but why a chrysanthemum

by the Virgin’s bare feet curved like
our ruined desert horizon, why

embellishment to the sung Mass
so enchanting to the serpent hissing

at Our Lady’s conquest of indifference.
I understand speech and its figurines

devote my accursed contraption:
(right ventricle and left plus

atria aorta, a pulmonary artery).
And if I don’t understand

I feel my frantic grasp of Life
(the beach ball circling Death

who just stands there, right there,
see him, the activities director

focusing the small us, you and me,
on a passage requiring  four elements

and choreography and the pleiad). 
As you sleep, two quail the shivering

brown of a fawn wait in shadow.
Mary and Serpentes call it a day

just like God did and what follows
is something Shakespeare’d call night

and I call the unmythology of two people
tending a garden one late afternoon.

Our Pointillist Galaxy
 

Throw myth and a caution to the midnight sapphire,

light the stuck fires to warm goddesses and their rapists.

In our sky, women not ignored.

Make the velvet town square an eternal reckoning

(a way to find your way).

Mars raped Rhea Silvia (well that’s that)

(that’s Romulus and Remus).

The West was born into crime.

Legend’s old as lust, doomed as

pride embedded in our helix vining up a trellis, tra-la.

Elevation’s for a few good women and

holies and what a word it is

strolling our red carpet tongues.

We overly love standard bearers

and our gestures not enough.

Every achievement is against the odds.

Oh my and tra-la.

Detail unambiguities of venality.

Set it right.  We’re feral.  No one’s perfect.
                Look up, up.

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Of Sarah Sarai's collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX), Gerald Schwartz wrote, "the confrontation and interactions with an emotional life gives the author's poems a nervy, discomfiting vitality. Their very rawness and urgency bring these poems to a kind of transcendence." Poems in Threepenny Review, Parthenon West, Mississippi Review, and others; a chapbook soon from Loose Gravel Press. She lives in her New York and dreams of her California.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 4 (2010): Emergence