“After the Meal”

by Bert Meyers

from In A Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems

1

A suburb of coffee cups;
napkins, those crumpled hills;
silverware, freeways
spotted with grease, with flesh...

and the ash-tray,
a ghetto full of charred men
with grizzled heads
who wasted their flame;
where every breath
scatters its bones
and small gray mounds
accumulate, then crumble,
like nations
or the knees of elephants.


2

Like a cleaning plant, steam
comes through a hole in your face.
Your exhaust is the last
wild horse that gallops away.


3

Smoke waters the flowers
that grow in the lungs.
The cigarette, like your life,
is a piece of chalk
that shrinks as it tries to explain.