Thomas Zimmerman
p o e t r y
Suspicious Mind
Just please slow down and talk to me: I’m dead,
you’re REM; I’m soul departed, you are love.
This afterwhat I’ve heard about: not all
believe. There must be something else, or this
is it. The Golden Rule, the amber waves
of grain. The beer I drain, the tunes I play
if only in my head, like Zeus with no
Athena there to bust my skull, owl-wise
and fully armored, so when words run out,
we fight. And no one’s here but us, you say.
Yes, I believe you/me. Our pronouns fade
like dreams on waking. Thoughts are all: seems safe
as proposition, gray and cool, a stone
that falls through water, water falling on
a stone. Concentric circles ripple, spread.
The serpent eats its tail. There’s zero owed.
Die of Life
The die of life’s six sides: love, death, art, sex,
Mom, Dad. It’s just last-cup-of-coffee ramblings:
roll the thoughts and hope that I’ll be rocked.
That’s Monk trink-trinkling from the speaker. He
transmogrifies his demons into limping saints.
I’m singing to myself: Remember half-
remembered Saturdays of childhood? Dad,
his second beer half-gone (Mom’s wifely limit
firm), retells the story of the teacher-nun
who whacked his knuckles with a ruler, told him
that he’d go to hell. And his reply, “That’s fine,
I want to be right where my good friends are.”
And happiness now whacks me like a mallet:
I’ve been bequeathed the life of such a sinner’s son.
Entangled
Sex-matted hair like roots that fork into
the earth. Earth under nails and under this
cool bed. The wires that bind us, puppet strings,
Medusa locks, ol’ ball-and-chain,
an albatross, long marriage and its weather.
Bleeding cords I’ve snapped or cut, the others
bleeding too, they cauterize, they lick them
into scar, to something smoother, stronger.
Age spots’ moss creeps up and down my hands,
along the riverbanks where we have loved,
your breasts so white they’re blue, the army blanket’s
olive drab so dense its blacker than
the night, Dad’s ghost still woven in the wool
that scratches naked skin. The smell of semen,
smell of blood: selected elementals.
River-scent as strong, and moving slower,
more enduring. We have been here many
times, but lightly, we, despite these darknesses
that seem so solid and so deep.
Tragic Love Triolet
Our love burns cold with déjà vu.
The heart’s renewed; the head grows old.
Macbeths we’ve been, our minds askew.
Our love burns cold with déjà vu.
Star-crossed, fate-poisoned, doomed, we two.
My Tristan died for your Isolde.
Our love burns cold with déjà vu.
The heart’s renewed; the head grows old.
The Gift
Some days, we fly apart: The words won’t come.
The head’s unscrewed. The limbs so loose, unstrung,
we’re piecemeal puppets. Pipes are shot, the plumb-
line’s snapped. Our body rags flap twisted, wrung
like tattered flags on some accursed field,
the sodden earth a mill, a churn, a maw
devouring all we think we are. But caw
of crow, of crone, can raise a sun fresh-peeled,
moon’s revenant. A string quartet, a mad
sonata licking wounds, a spell cast wrong
that knits and doesn’t snag, wild and free
synaptic sparking in the brain, the bong
exhausted, tinctures chugged, and we, charmed we,
reclaim the gift, the song we’ve always had.
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, Little Rose Magazine, and Furtive Dalliance. Tom's website: thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/.