Three poems

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2001 by Clary, Killarney

El Paso. Eleventh floor of the hotel in a dust storm with eight hundred miles of interstate ten vibrating behind my eyes. Two nights ago there were two of us. East of Redlands, I was away, and couldn't remember or predict. There spun the windmill blades defiantly, making use.

I hear grains of grit tick against the glass and a howl that won't let up. No time to inhale. On point, I might fall cynical, fall sentimental; they are the same. I want you to stand in front of me and be other. The wall of umber air thins for a span and the city sharpens. I figure as I watch the depot sign dim and clear without pattern the number of interruptions, the shortest distance.

The boy had told a rhyme as he unfastened his pants. He was scolded, ended up in the cab of a big rig with this man he slightly knew, under a clear sky on the straight desert interstate.

To the driver the receiver acknowledged the quick shift, a cold front. Both were in shirt sleeves, laughing. Now the driver went back to the icy waiting -room to fetch the boy. On the green vinyl chair he was propped, blood dotting at his mouth; he was shivering. The driver picked him up like an armful of tissue paper. I felt that. I felt his young feathery breath, "My poor boy," I moaned. -1 was lifted. I was light as a dried leaf, dried brittle star, headlights through falling snow. I was high above the road, traveling.

The last sure thing that night was my patent leather shoe. Darkness lifted me in his warm shirt and cold jacket. Old voices. Lighted wheel rolling on the lake. The pulse of my day lost its measure; I could feel endlessness and belong there. The lights fell and touched themselves and rose up-by motions repeated, taken and complete.

KILLARNEY CLARY is the author of By Common Salt, Oberlin College Press, 1996;

Who Whispered Near Me, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989 and Bloodaxe Books, England, 1993; and By Me, By Any, Can and Can't Be Done (chapbook) Greenhouse Review Press, 1980. She received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in 1992 and lives in Los Angeles.