Banana Bread

Once upon a time

there was a girl

who liked banana bread

and there was a baker

who made her banana bread

and she ate as much

banana bread as anyone

could ever possibly eat.

But the baker who was

an expert at banana bread

made more and more

at a greater and greater velocity

and the girl who loved banana bread

could not keep up

so made a circle of banana bread

around herself and loaf by loaf

built a golden banana bread tower.

This took some time to do

and the girl’s nut brown hair

grew longer and longer

as the tower grew taller

and when she placed the last loaf

of fruity bread on the tower’s parapet

her long hair fluttered

like a murder of crows

in the glory of the breeze

and at that moment

she looked somewhat like Rapunzel.

31.I.12.TS.>MS.

Tin Rain

When the desert

first bloomed like a rose

and seagulls insect sated

became sainted

in the first

of his small rooms

with three spiders and a cot

on wheels

a small strip of utah sky

like a tiny television show

against clouds passing

Then that pink dorm room

with its parade of shadow lovers

some now dead

and its paintings its laundry line

of old tee shirts and grey socks

just about dry

Now in the city of harbours

in this final tiny room

above the domain of the lost

and somewhere beneath

a shrapnel of love like

tin rain across

my narrow train of thought

going somewhere

on these electric rails

one cyclopean eye catapults

through odyssean night.

Timothy Shay for MS -2012

ALLEMANDE

for Megan Williston Shay

On the temporal plain

burnt umber bison

spread out walking, a thundercloud,

separate as raindrops

yet melded like molasses

across the vast prairie.

Sparrows, just one of Aphrodite’s

four sacred elements;

waft up in a dance,

vast choreography of community,

and who can tell which bird

is the true leader?

On wing they seamlessly shift

unanimous in a drumbeat undulation,

each individual alone, but joined

perfectly, in the allemande of all.

On the temporal plain each molecule

a brilliant singer,

Each child a swaddled and

secret Buddha, long awaited,

We know the song we search for sleeps

in all our throats.

NAMELESS CITY
ts/mws 2011

In a foreign country now. You
were a foreign country then and
a surprise continent on this
big and worn newsprint
map o empty map

You appear
in poems Centre or edgy You
will attend so wear seven layers
and brace yourself There
are poems falling like ice
in the sideways wind of winter
where you thought you would
always walk More

than a shadow in the hedge
Small maps
inadequate to your Continent
its several dances And

now I am a city
Some have named and cling to
as if the neighbourhood
of my long shadow Is not subject
to liquification Now

I am a nameless city
Layers of stone steel and concrete
feet Holding
down the furled fist of forest Patient
in a place where a rumour of light dwells
with A warm desire to move upward

You are a traveler And
now You are the line on several maps
and eat shrimp pancakes You hoard
the heat and foreign ocean up
like hot red bricks for cold feet
In your future
of pending winters You drink
hot tea Your heart is a warm china cup

You the floating city You
attached to the blue sky above
like a loose carpet of balloons
A conceptual life that in the beginning
and at the end is not a foreign place Only
while floating and nameless We are the cities.

DECISION

5 III 11 ts/mws

It is late winter.
I am in a ragged orchard
on the edge between
this fruitful order
and tangled forest

I hear an old language
whisper, and high up
in the sleeping canopy
hangs an uncultivated
invitation to intense light.

Lovers of my beloved,
watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,
how they wear her body like a rare shawl.

Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,
songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

-Leonard Cohen