Bruce Bond

Picture Postcard from a Comic Book from the Early Sixties

I would draw the heart beating, if I could,

which, granted, feels less like a conclusion,

more like a confession of my limitations.

I would comic-book the motion as little

bolts of light.  I love that.  Indeed I tried,

though I could not draw, I could not tell

a story, so I made the heart thump a lot,

not much happened, nothing I recall,

though sometimes still I hear it step down

my pillow.  And I want to follow,

so I draw a pencil that begins to move. 

Picture Postcard from a Hole in the Garden

I do not believe in ghosts, but I have seen

their kind in limbs that leaflet the plain. 

Is there no burden, without root,

no stone left uncarved in the garden.

I do not know what spirit is, if it returns,

if words float an inch above the marble.

But I have felt the weight of nothing,

the shatter of the tree that anchors trees.

I strapped a vault of coins to my back

and walked the halls of a basement

full of listeners, long after they have flown.

Voicemail from a Switchblade in my High School

I will spare you the story.  The one I have

that nearly cuts me still, and then, it ends.

Let me say instead, I have been to Tēshin,

Although I never have, and find my story

dull, if not a touch pretentious, to citizens

imagined, caught in the crossfire of nations,

descending into bars and comas, codas,

smoke from the sudden laughter of mouths,

a charitable dark across their faces.  And yes,

when the blade came out, I was frightened.

And the music was fantastic from the river and beyond.

Note Left inside the God Particle

I placed a grain of cobalt on a slide,

and, in my microscope, I saw a crystal

the color of heaven in a Book of Hours. 

Do you know it.  The autumn

air that burns, forever, in its season. 

The clarity is reassuring, the furrows

of barley, cherry, prayer, the covenant

that binds the blue to earth.  Do you see

the women kneel to gather their harvest.

Lost now, and yet they bend each year,

a spear of sky in everything they touch.

Note Left in the Eye of a Fly

The small-ribbed, once inflatable creatures,

now extinct, encrusted in walls that bear

the movies of the sleepless, what do they know

of the history on their backs, the celluloid

woman on her horse who moves to survive,

lest the beam that breathes the light in her

consumes her.  Strangers, all of them,

fossils of the want that skeletons the distance.  

They are everywhere.  In every face,

the trilobite, the nemesis, the friend, the eye

that breaks an eye into a thousand, like a fly.

Note Left in a Friend’s Body

To wonder if a sketch, a signature, a wall.

Is.  To admit.  A wall.  Call it language,

the skin that holds the self just enough

to feel at home with the windows open.

I had a friend who drank himself out

of our lives, just when he discovered

a whole host of windows he never knew

existed.  He lay in his home a while

before they found him.  His cats walked

a silence still unnamed.  You are kind.

The way you pass the language down.