2 Poems by Daniel Lawless

—from Poems À la minute

Daniel

My name. Shared with many others, 

Dead and living, a few famous, most not,

Yet with each of whom I feel an elusive but undeniable 

Kinship. Although meaningless in my mouth 

As it must be in the ears of my niece’s pet rabbit,

Insistently familiar on the lips of others—

My twin, in fact, according to the Ancients;

For the Romantics, “the shadow  

with whom a man travels all his days.”

But is it I who look like you, or you like me?

And if you are like my constant shadow why

Then whenever we meet like this is it always as if for the first time,

Daniel, how is it even lightly etched on this little park bench

On 77th Street nestled among overturned pink kids’ bikes 

And wildflowers you somehow frighten me?

[I tell you this, Tom, because you are dead]

                                                                     with apologies to RB

In 1977, when the tornado as hunger blows through bodies blew 

Through the nearby cemetery leaving only the chattering teeth

Of mossy gravestones and the bare carotene trunks of ancient elms,

When it snatched up the adjacent Carmelite cloister and shook it, impaling two young 

Postulants on shards of exploding rafters as they huddled in the chapel,

Before heading further east to visit a nursing home and wreathe an infant in barbed wire,

I was alone in a quiet basement library room in a distant college reading Robert Bly’s

Silence in the Snowy Fields. 

I tell you this, Tom, because you are dead. Because speaking 

To the flawed dead who are perfect now is easy, as I lean now as I should have then

Over your body, and stare a long time into your eyes 

As through a train window veiled with soft dust, until the words

I read then but never got a chance to say come to me 

As a few simple wishes: that despite the anguish and crazy hungers that spiraled 

Through your life, you too might have known the calm I knew that afternoon of iron

Mailbox handles and dark tire tracks in snow, 

And somehow understood the salvation of Guinea hens hidden from the hired girl’s hatchet 

In impossible paces, asleep in the trees, even if that salvation was not yours;

That if you trembled in your hospital bed it was only 

The slight trembling of words on white pages opened on a table, 

Like the trembling of grass or water deep in the wells,

That is temporary; a wish that says, after the terrible whirlwind blew through

It was as if on a train the conductor had poked you and at last you arrived out of the darkness 

Suddenly awake to a strange new city, utterly happy.

Daniel Lawless’s book, The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With, was published in 2018.  Recent/forthcoming poems in FIELD, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, upsteet; a recipient of a Shifting Foundation grant, he is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and the annual Plume Poetry anthologies.