A POEM BY KATE GREENSTREET



                    from THE LAST 4 THINGS



          The giant takes us down.
          A man with no arms.
          Unbreakable.

          What made today

          is concordant
          transforms
          the brief, decisive phase we call fear.

          I look to that whited-over part and see a face.
          Then I look to the black and
          see the same face.

          “There were tunnels... chambers beneath
          some of the sidewalks…
          page after page of places…”

          The last thing you think of.
          Won’t be my fluffy blonde hair.

          We have his ear.
          He was the first boy I knew. The liberation.
          Which I remember
          from sand. The pail shape. The whole world’s washed out.

          These words: take refuge.

          What I mean by dream in this
          case is: his last dream.
          And you see no land, you’re
          that far away.


          Someone coughs
          in my first life.
          Someone must have noticed
          how like you he is…

          First you can’t be heard
          Then you can’t hear
          Then you can’t dial
          Then you can’t turn it off

          You pose a question, I repeat it.
          And as always with speech, one is blind.

          As a reflector, as of cloth or
          thick flecked glass, as slats…
          You asked though

          about the self.
          There were fireflies,
          and the corn cut to the nubs. The windows
          shook, we saw a flash of light…

          then the tiniest
          feckles
          of rain

          after we waited
          all day




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Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook, Learning the Language, was published last fall by Etherdome Press. Her first full-length book, case sensitive, will be out from Ahsahta Press in September 2006. Visit her online at kickingwind.com.


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