Robert Winner

Stripped to the waist,
hard-muscled, downcast, under the guns
of lounging guards, they are clearing a roadside
across a palmetto landscape.

I notice one blond boy swinging a pick,
broad-shouldered. His skin is smooth, bright, sweaty.
His upright body ripples
under the rigid fury of his face.

Surviving in its fragile skin,
a white egret rises
from the gulf of its strength.
I want the lightest needle of a pine
to fall on my hand,
a pine with ravaged limbs.

I'd stare through salt-blind eyes
at a remote fragile sea. I'd roar.

I'm an inexperienced mourner
I don't even know how to begin
to cry out like that old man
wailing in the next hospital room—
oi vay, oi vay—his two sounds
beating against the wall.

He makes me squirm
but I get his message better than my own.

Opportunity I love you
Windows and watermelons march down the street
The air is nobody

Sky is in position
I am ready to endure my freedom

A riderless horse on a saffron plain
A lake that spins
A tree that lets the wind decide

I try to carry the gravestone
from the darkness of my mother's sickroom—
scratches of light around drawn shades—
outside, the gold and red of autumn.

She is like a queen in exile
scraping with her nails on silk walls
her message of anger, her weak
insatiable demands and regrets.