Sample Poems by Michael D. Riley

Dawn

Not gently, he comes to her
from behind.  They face the cave mouth at dawn.
As the sun spills itself upon the mountains,
he feels in his release incoming light.
 
Thumb upon the mouth of his bowl,
he presses its lugged curve slowly, rubs
his fingerpad circle after circle,
leans toward it his whole body.
 
The dying elk’s fear thrills him again,
fills his muscles with salt.  As he
poises to break its neck, its eyes pin him
down like hers.  Identity troubles his sleep.
 
Walking at noon, his sunlit skin radiates
warmth in return.  He stops.  Eyes closed,
he slowly raises his arms.  Lifted up,
he thinks of wings.  Moaning, he soars.
 
Once in water slipping on a mossy stone,
he flails until weakness floats him
on the surface, gliding between small
paddlings of his hands, buoyed and calmed.
 
Visions in sleep lead him through
new worlds rising from the old.
Their pictures compel him to charcoal,
verify in line, copy and create.
 
He slips around his shoulders the elk’s hide,
fits the rack to his head, recalls the meat
filling his stomach with peace.  He stoops
and glides: as if.  Paws the dust.
 
Charred bones heaped, he smells their grease
on his fingers.  Touches again their smooth sides,
shifts and angles them, clicking, together.
Braids them in a leather rope for his neck.
 
Moonlight steals color into sleep.               
Sunlight fits his children to his sight.
Absence and his first dead woman haunt him
as his hand kneads the flank of this second one.
 
Weed straw and nettles, his own smells,
repeated days, seasons, stars.  The hunt.
Birth and death in blood and silence,
blood and noise.  Each breaks in on him,
 
rubbing their skin against his skin.
Above each moment he sits removed
as each shape circles a center
teasing him like fog, just out of reach.

 Adam’s Death
                                    
—After a poem by Nancy Sullivan
                                                                                   
After their voices hoarsened and stuck,
Grated like husks along their throats
And still he failed to move or talk back,
They poked him with fingers and sticks.
The skin merely puckered and went white.
They pulled at his ears and lips,
Flicked with tentative fingertips his blue eyelids
Until one found two flat stones to hold them down
And so disguise his empty stare as sleep.
He could still bleed, they found,
When one’s cutting stone slipped its thong
And grazed his stippled thigh,
But the blood flowed heavy, dark, and slow
Across the pale and pimpled skin.
They covered him with signs,
The tracery of fire-hardened sticks:
Natural wonders of trees and stars and rocks,
The shapes of women, designs
Of his own hearth, bowl, and weapons,
Events from his particular past.
Then they dragged him with care across the keep,
Cleared a circle for him with their hands
And with leaf-brooms swept it clean,
Then sat down one by one
To watch him turn to stone.
He informed their eyes all day.
At night they heaped the fire nearby
And tricked themselves with shadows
Ten thousand times: eyelids, fingers,
Toes, lips beneath the shadowy tongues
Of light seemed to strain and shift.
Always they were wrong.                                         
Only his hair and beard combed the wind
As they always had when he stood
Tall to lead the hunt or to speak by the night fire.
When his chest hollowed like a cave
Beneath a steep ladder of ribs
And the rest went slack and stank
Like the old uneaten meat
They could not stand to smell or see,
They threw him away—
Knowing nothing else to do—
Into memory, strangely certain,
As the bog pulled him down
With its remorseless wet hands,
That bad dreams would soon uproot them
From this land.

Into the Bog
 
Into the old times.  Quilting the hides,
eyeing paths just wide enough to scout through,
fear and death immediate salts to breath,
caves of the body to sleep inside.
Desire as clear as the sun:  the trail
fat with game, her fingers and lips at once,
spring softening the hills, the gods’ wild dance
in the carved rocks, sustaining without fail.
 
Because down the mountainside a yellow fog
blurs the cave mouth and its tongues of fire.
Stars wheel their knives above the bog
where the bodies cure and turn to leather.
Above slit throats their young features sag
with sleep, weary guarding life forever.

The Body in the Bog
 
Absolute as this braided noose or slit throat,
the body in the bag remembers.
Each mole and eyelash, every fingerprint
 
of sleep’s neighbor lives on.  2000 years
wear the same ragged clothes.  Identical,
time-sprung, as if caught in mid-sentence
 
about the wheat’s tall wealth or some
new neighbor’s hips, her golden hair.
His neck wound’s lips mock her mouth
 
of generation, yet his face sags in peace.
Although the tannic acid dyes his dreams
the shade of dried blood, he sleeps
 
the sleep of the blessed.  The scapegoat
is sacred, like the boggy lands.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy,
 
Camus said, tanned and floating
through the slop of ages, then the grappling
hook scarlet with ideas that won’t let us
 
rest or leave.  The soul stutters
when the shell refuses, surrounds him
with the rusty water of a new womb,

pay generation unto generation
the price of perfect memory:
perfect sacrifice.

Caves
 
In one corner a red hand
says in ochre:  I am not here.
I am elsewhere on my legs, my hair
hitting my shoulders as I run.
I am not even bone.
 
Bison and miniature horse
do not prance along these walls.
The mammoth whose outline follows
so shrewdly the natural clefts and strata
of the rock knee to flank:  This mammoth
is not here.  Three sabre-toothed tigers
roar in silence, deafening only time. 
These tigers are extinct.
They became extinct as soon as they
found themselves confounded by stone.
 
In firelight, the lines shift and run.
They suggest.  Until the fire goes out.
Until the cave’s dark breath, ash and damp,
fills every inch like black water.
 
For I have not walked down this path,
serpentine, barely visible among linden trees,
waist-high grasses, nodding pink and yellow
wildflowers.  Down and down to the abrupt
small window in the rock, weed-grown,
irregular.  I have not made my way, stooping
through this lost door, to middle earth,
charcoal’s death and ochre’s blood
survival into all that is
and is not, what escapes
to remain the taut rope between us.                                                          
I never found this cave,
30,000 years asleep, painted marrow
her bone retains.  Greater than Lascaux,
Chauvet, Grotte Cosquer.  Revelation itself
mile after mile.  A world, they all say.
A world gone forever back among us,
awake to our arc lights,
microcomputers and spectroscopes.

The past, they say, is not gone.  It lives.
It gestures all around us here its color and line,                    
its textured suspicions made manifest.
Death hesitated here, and died.
30,000 years these coiled muscles waited
to spring, these claws to rake
this bull’s flank, these diminutive-hoofed
gazelles to dance again, this red hand
to declare:  I grasp this limestone still.
 
We need only stumble and look up.
Tilt whatever beam we bring with us
overhead, attend to the outline again,
discover and invest.  Ague and chill
will not matter, nor the unsuspected cancer.
What we touch here will be enough:
this skinned grace, this deep surface
held up by our common ground.Lucy
 
Our strict memory in bone grins here
with relief, free of soft complication at last,
those anxious floodings of blood
and persistent dampenings, pleasure
swelling into pain until she hardly knew
the difference, all the encumbrance of love  
long since melted away, sexless
until the experts probe pelvis and shoulder
with calipers and statistics,
their skeletons of lust.      
 
How simple and clean her symmetry:
the embracing ribs, delicate fingers and toes,
the anatomy of love available at last
in every scar of passion and disease.
Here on the hip that drunken slap
against the hut’s stone wall the night
her third child was conceived, and his memory
too here in the bend by the birth canal.
The elbow that leaned in wonder
toward the stars above a moon-silvered rock,
knees that scrubbed stone, shoulders bowed
by sheaves and young, fingertips that knew
the green grain from the ripe, and the herb
that cures the poison that it grew beside.
And here is where the world’s thoughts
flew in as odor, color, sound
and then flew out again as voice,
articulate clothes we cannot guess,
one more tongue dressed in stone.