After the Meal
By Bert Meyers
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.
Copyright Credit: Bert Meyers, "After the Meal" from In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems. Copyright © 2007 by Bert Meyers. Reprinted by permission of the literary estate of Bert Meyers.
Source: In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (The University of New Mexico Press, 2007)