Henri Cole Poems

Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
...

I found a baby shark on the beach.
Seagulls had eaten his eyes. His throat was bleeding.
Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.
The ocean had scraped his insides clean.
...

Tired, hungry, hot, I climbed the steep slope
to town, a sultry, watery place, crawling with insects
and birds.
In the semidarkness of the mountain,
...

He drew
these dandelions
during one
of the days
when the only
...

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say

you love me. The words, like moist fingers,

appear before me full of promise but then run away
...

It is the hour of lamps.
On our knees my mother
and I, still young, color
with crayons threadbare nap
...

Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.

'I don't belong to nobody,' Yang insists vulgarly.

'Yang,' I reply, 'you don't know nothing.'
...

Dusty and treeless, the street sloped beneath us.
Somewhere a hammer made thunderclaps,
forging the night-sky.
...

After the death of my father, I locked

myself in my room, bored and animal-like.

The travel clock, the Johnnie Walker bottle,
...

Born, I was born.
Tears represent how much my mother loves me,
shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
...