Sam Thilén
Let’s Play Twister Let’s Play Risk
The porterweed drops purple blooms.
At noon, its leaves lean in across the porch
as if to scratch the door, and the jasmine
claws at the gutter, though I weigh it down.
Hard to believe there’s been a hurricane,
although houseflies lined up on a dry vine
say otherwise. They hatched in our garbage
while the flood receded inch by half inch
and chicken bones foundered along the yard.
Every now and then I knock the flies off
with the long spout of a watering can.
Once I found a rabble of rock graylings
alighting on clods of earth on a dirt road,
although meadow lupines and wild carrots
ran along the verge. I’ve lured some reef fish
by dropping dense objects to the seafloor
and I’ve spooked other reef fish that way too.
That is to say, not all fish behaviors
are predictable. Not all butterflies
are sane. A man floating down the highway
is not always a man drowning; sometimes
he is riding an inflatable swan,
having a flood day. Funny thing about
water: when it gets in your lungs, it burns.
But it is hard to believe in danger,
isn’t it? The rain comes through the ceiling
but stops before the ceiling comes down.
Barracuda never come after you.
WRECKING
Dear Previous Tenant,
Maybe it’s the calm and the heat—
something like what sailors called fata morgana
flourishing, a serif on the face of an ocean.
I try to sweep away a garlic husk
from beneath the resin
on the hardwood. In the closet,
a shoeful of sand
wonders why you left it.
You moored the chandelier
by looping its chain with the thing—
the lovely ordinary thing
whose presence made me look for the word:
carabiner—and now its ochre light
untextures every wall
except a blot, two letters of shadowed braille
(the creature eggs,
long painted over)
fragmenting you into being, relic of a life
lived elsewhere. I want to call you by name.
My thumb mumbles over the blip
in the sheetrock, where your brushstroke
cohered something in.
RAINSONG
—for Houston
A figure hides alone in an oak tree,
writing a line that falls into trochees.
Lyrics brim with sluice gates, whispers, tea bags.
Everything’s running off. A drowning bee tags
a winecup; wet petals molt like underwear.
Precipitation is a wonder!—air
wears water, sheds it. People take showers
indoors while the storms shake towers
downtown—now don’t they sound like lunatics?
Crisis changes nothing. (The tuna licks
stuff with first and second tongue.) Clover leaves
dividing in fine rain look like lovers cleaved
apart, look like tentages of hobos
when they’re floating away. The midtown bohos
will string hammocks and go flower picking
in tomorrow’s sun, while the power’s flicking
on and off someplace they have never seen.