MARIE KILROY

Marie Kilroy has recently been published in Allegro Poetry Magazine, Loveliest Magazine and the Lummox Press. She graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a B.A. in English and lives in New York City.

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                               Desert Seeds 
 
“…things and animals – and our enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation.” – Rilke
 
I lie flat against the flat Mexican plateau.
The cacti’s silhouettes
stand silently in the sunset like soldiers,
arms raised skyward.
 
In the early evening the stars flood in like girls in Quinceañera gowns,
grasshopper salt on their shiny lips,
and they float above on the sky’s dance floor
as the volcano with its icy hat
puffs his pipe to greet them.
 
Rilke believed in a future poet who comes
to say the ecstasies that are unsayable.
I believe him and the owl uttering words
I cannot repeat. The black witch moth’s
seven inch wingspan sets in motion a fire
on the coast. Small animal skeletons litter the sand
like diamonds on a rich woman’s arm. We are all birthing all the time.
I vow to love it all, even the solitude. I can see the seeds alight
in the wind, birds to new births, the world over
in majesty and exaltation.
 


                                     City Swan
 
In the late evening in Central Park lies the edge of the lake--
glowing in the little light from the moon
lies the swan, from song to silence and stuck in the little laps
of water against earth, beak tucked in a U
as if she was trying to un-see,
to look around the still-rooted trees
in their black gowns like willows at a funeral
mystical, ethereal in gossamer nightshade
the feathers still satin, the wings unfolded, leaving her round body exposed,
her tiny feet in mud –
O, mythological Swan; O regal Swan—felled, felled--
A homeless man laughs at the sight—“That’s what’s next!!”
and pees into the grass, stance askance
the vinegar smell, a fog smoking upwards in the branches--
her body hardening against the soft waves.