POOL 

a journal of poetry

BRUCE SMITH

Song of the Ransom of the Dark

A neural, feral fix on the beautiful movie face

	I went to Vietnam to adopt a kid

like a baby bird imprinted to the worst affliction, havoc, holocaust

	I wanted meaning in my life

from my seat in the dark while I sipped a Coke

	Poetry had failed me

a movie set, a rear projection, junk

	slowly poetry had failed me

it seems. It's where the conversation took place

	first as grace, then as skin, then

a back and forth like flame. It is where love came from

	as woman as terminal being

as fetish-a thigh, a foot in heels-all of what we wanted

	plucked up again and woven

fatality and church and commodity-something about to burst

	the way it's supposed to work, to purl and circle

into my lap from my purchase in

	you like the mats and baskets of the country a plush paranoia of the glance

	the squat huts and women's carrying in the rain

of horror or color in our Wizard of Oz

	that's still the third world

or Apocalypse Now Redux; redux

	and corrupt as if America wasn't

hard to horrify, hard to please

	everyone who speaks my language has bad teeth and

I can't remember in the film why in the first place

	a hand out that wants to be greased

the government hired Ingrid Bergman

	In the first place what's the word for want

but I remember the head lights and the curve

	or want to have where have = pay = name =

the fragment of music, the set of keys

	crime = proof of my desperation

the set of keys like coins or slow rain

	then I enter a dark room

and a moment when the black white

	like a latecomer to a movie

faces are all there are

	where there's a table with a can of Coke

an infinitely prolonged walk up the stairways

	and a bare bulb that's from a torture scene

dizzying and it's not the horror

	I imagine-they say your mother was an American

but the pleasure that can be found daily

	and I am broken down in front of

the infinitely prolonged kiss

	the small boned men and I must insist

encircling glances, tracking shots, arabesques

	in spite of it all I am fit to mother

the one dialect of shadow and the war, the girl

	all this because of the failure of

the eye dilated