Mark DeCarteret

4 poems

**

here (after)


decades spent
adhering & peeling
up decals nearly
coming to blows
w/our mirrors
it’s no wonder we
belong most to night
& its anonymous bidding
the specs of its stars
(who wouldn’t want
to be pinched off the earth
eventually bones & all
& launched spaceward
well beyond any
body’s embrace?)
& though some have said
hell is just groping
for a chair in the darkness
always thinking that a light
is just seconds away
I’ll be happy to wait
out another front
w/this list of impossible
heavens we’ve managed
which I’ve never quite
lent to my lips

**

(the) march


he baby-blinked
as if mouthing the universe
a gesture he assures
us was Christ’s
just like that third day
when He rested
& they quarried His chest
of all of those casual devils

who’ll indulge me each night
just in time to be read
like a crack in eternity?
now letters have rectified little
& for that I donned jacket
put up w/those boots?
o so south toward that
settlement of etceteras

**

improv


the breathing
did next to

nothing nor
the exercise

giving up
things

changed even
less picturing

me & the shore
line w/its

drummed hymn
encouragement

I’m sorry
again could you

tell me
did I want some

new me (some
one hundred

hummed drones--
the latest rage?)

or was I
still not

enough still
always

having to
work at what I

had & then
lost but somehow

keep
gaining back?

**

lullaby


my dog circles
again & again
as if it's awaiting
some word maybe
why we are sorry
wrecks of bones
burrowing
at the back
of some throat
God knows I’ve stolen
everything:
the remedies
the sounds I make
stepping out from
the shadows--
so go ahead &
sleep little poet
I sing to myself
for once awake
you will always be
x’s success

**

return to sawbuck 4.1

**
Mark DeCarteret’s work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press) and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. He was recently selected as Portsmouth New Hampshire’s seventh Poet Laureate.