Unspoken
Understanding
Our China
cabinet
held knives and forks,
die-cast metal cars,
a wooden egg,
and two sea shells
the size of my thumb.
We didn’t have very much China.
We put cheap ceramics
on display instead,
old relics in our own
museum that I visited
behind two sliding glass doors
when no one was looking.
I knelt in front of those doors
on my six-year-old knees,
picked up a shell, and held it
like a precious stone.
I put it to my ear,
heard beaches and waves,
the infinite spread of the ocean.
I heard secrets, imagined everything,
until one day without a second thought
my mother said,
It’s not that kind of shell,
and nothing was sacred anymore.
Caught
in Flight
The clown
is taking off his painted face, the crooked smile.
The lions caged lie low, their wet lips smelling of fresh blood,
while the elephants stand looking bored with the routine.
Far below the numbered rows, a solitary figure sweeps the dirt,
and the trapeze hangs motionless from its strings,
high above the safety net suspended as an afterthought.
The evening crowd that came to be amused eases toward the door,
a silent hum replacing the giddy sounds of wonder,
of children chirping still about the man who swallowed fire
then lived to take a deep and gracious bow.
All appears in place within the striped, circular folds of the pavilion,
except for the sparrow beating its small wings against the canvas.
The lone bird pauses briefly on a wire, then renews its wild flight,
feeling for the way out.
It seems that her small body suffers, endures a moment of captivity,
untrained yet like all the rest to appreciate the calm of blind obedience.
Outside, the last of the audience will climb into their cars
and yield to the embrace of traffic, the sincere loneliness of night.
Afterward, maybe the quiet of dinner will follow, and conversation,
or an ice cream cone indulged in with guilt along the road.
The tent walls will come down tonight only to be built again.
Living rooms will flicker into life under the glow of television screens.
Copyright © 2008 Andrei Guruianu