Myronn Hardy is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Radioactive Starlings (Princeton UP, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, FIELD and elsewhere. He divides his time between New York City and Morocco.---------
Reflecting
The deaf speak with lashing hands.
Their thoughts explode through
fingers wands with invisible shock.
One of them notices the boys bringing
their girlfriends sticks of bread in foil packages.
The girls’ reflections on the foil not what
they saw that morning in their mirrors.
But older perhaps not them at all
but women they were expected to be.
Women like their mothers alone
in pale rooms waiting for finches
to fly through almost windows.
What is expectation?
She expects the deaf man to speak to not
stare when she stares.
To turn away when her lover offers dry bread.
Light glints from her lover’s
silver chain.
She was once silver.
In that dream she couldn’t hear.
Her mouth flooded with sea.
The fish were mirrors cutting through waves
Waves of mirrors waves of fish
as mirrors they could see everything.
The deaf man folds his hands.
Her lover notices him.
My life.
My life here.
This Contemplation
See me in the morning
staring contemplating empress tree
shadows on a splintered street.
There is a garden on the left overrun with
Russian sage where we can sit our silence
sonic in mineral domes.
The bread you carried in paper ate with
quail eggs this morning was an offering.
The last loaf a woman
shaped into itself.
Baked sold to you before
transitioning another life.
We speak into the other morphing
into another existence the one
we are making among this violet.
You had no premonition that previous night
brushing rows of tangled hair smooth.
The leopard in dream merely a giant cat
resting beneath a giant jacaranda.
That street no longer splintered no longer
shadowed with empress trees.
I ponder you now.
The Chiming
The cooing in the lemon tree
is an omen of cathedral bells.
The calm before iron meets itself
in violence meant to signal joy beginning.
I have lost joy in this garden on
this bench meant for meditation.
Glare through bamboo leaves such yellowing.
Moss over a marble statue of someone
mythical reclining with his watchful dog.
Servants among servants refusing
to serve the dead.