The 2River View
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Brendan Constantine

The boy has come back

                                           the boy
from the night-market of Sixth Street
is at the door with his bicycle & his eye
black as quarry mud. He won't face me,
speaks to my neck, shoulders down,
ready to close. I want to say this right:
he looks like someone stole his antlers,
like lamplight is heavy, like a photograph
of a photograph. He says some men tried
to eat him. He remembers that I fed him.
Can he sleep here? Maybe live here?
Do I have anything to cover his eye?

I dreamt I was your finger

the one you lost as a kid, clipping roses
with your mother. It began with falling
from your hand, from the dripping V
of the shears. I landed in the ripe mud
forgetting, who I was leaking out in pulses:
I am a girl. I was a girl. Whose thoughts
are these? The dark, the dark. The earth
carried your voices, I could feel myself
talked about, looked for, not found,
though I pointed & pointed. I'm coming
back to you, slowly like an arrow shot
und
erground. I woke knowing this.

Brendan Constantine has appeared in Ploughshares, RUNES, and elsewhere. Letters To Guns was released in 2009
from Red Hen Press. He is poet-in-residence at Loyola Marymount University Extension and the Alzheimer's
Poetry Project. contact

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