David Johnson
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David Johnson was born in Cambridge and lives in Boston. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Still, Stirring, Woolly Mammoth, Alicubi Journal, Gargoyle, Meanie, Can We Have Our Ball Back and The Bitter Oleander. In 2002 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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from Winter Blues
first published in The Bitter Oleander
1
I don't know the world. What's under my feet, what's above
my hands? Every night I laugh with someone else's voice.
She told me winter's pain is everywhere, but even my
shadow knows the frozen things in our lives can't bleed.
All of the sad books I've read are on the ground.
I step on each one as if I'm walking on a glass bridge.
The writer asked his sister why she never spoke, why she
threw away his pages like they were an old man's teeth.
Music is the breath of grief. I'll sing when the sparrow
on my roof drops his feathers in the gray air.
2
Lao Tzu wrote about the Tao in a book shorter than
a moth's wing. Everything around him was a mirror.
She's gracefully sad. She talked about sex and why
her heart and her breasts are hostile neighbors.
Hers was the last pale body I ever touched in the dark.
Even when I close my eyes, she's still looking.
My body met its ghost after the friend I never see
wrote to me, concerned for my lack of spiritual depth.
Fortune tellers told me to burn my clothes and
food in the fields and pray for innocence.
3
A gratefully naked woman and a bearded man sang
to each other, threw lilacs at each other, then wept.
Cold, cold. Tomorrow will be colder, but just a little.
If I could plow, I'd bury my bed under the dirt.
Why won't she love me? She weeps every morning, she
leaves all her men, her unborn children chase her everywhere.
Why do you cry? The sun still makes shadows. There's
bread for the mothers of saints in the other world.
Listening to blues singers and poets all the time
turns her smile into an advertisement for loss.
4
Asylum poets don't own paper, won't touch women.
They turn their dead cats' blood into ink for the walls.
The Taoist might say, Watch women, watch men, watch the
ten thousand forests. When we open our eyes, we lie to ourselves.
But I must leave my room and hug nature. Piety doesn't
help. All the animals I pet won't bless my spirit.
The thief wrote, You can have a woman if you want, but
She'll lose all her nakedness and never honor your love.
The blues has taken me ten days into winter. Now
I dance in fits and even my blood feels like snow.
