It is a waste
to toss coins
into the oasis—
*
It is only
natural to wish it
otherwise—
Opening your eyes
again, it is
a tantrum a prayer a poem’s counting
a caravan of five. And God’s voice
in the desert is best—
Nothing the words won’t do.
No waste of water for speech
he said, and no one listened
with long faces
of the beasts
no one named
drinking in abundance.
FROM COINS FROM THE COINS IN STORIES
(OF NO-SUCH-THINGS AND NANNIES)
know such things better: He was born blind after his father’s unseen sins
of the hands. Of a dimpled chin. And so was the care for his childhood
intricate: contracted—grand—but upkeep also. Like the way he liked licking
at the wrist of each of his three nannies, and because in both eyes blind,
he let them lead him by the ear—faster across the cruise-line decks. Promptly
through the arcades, the markets’ trickling fruit-stalls. To advance the idea and go
to the strip-mall Dairy-Queen was his every summer tricking hatched—
and he rubbed his hands together until a plan of cold came to them, in a cup
or a cone. But mostly he liked mint tingling his tongue muscling forward
like music, unlocking its quiet, sharpening the shapely, he talked-into the cool
liquid-solid studded with chocolate chips…. All this he bargained out of summer
Saturdays as was handed his favorite nanny (who let him hold long enough he knew
intimately) his father’s preferred plastic magnetic, striped to swipe—
whose raised numeric teeth he smiled to see with his fingers each week.
FROM COINS FROM THE COINS IN STORIES
(ARTIFACT: GREEK OX OF THE FAR-FLUNG COMMERCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTACTS)
Hammer
Punch
Flan
Anvil
words artifact like that of the flattened world
unearthed as the means, the meanness coins become
for words, and suppose I mean these in Greek, in ear-
shot of gods, of agoras widening speech, as
words changed, or suppose I mean I could make them
be as intimate as fingers, as opposable as thumbs
of the hand wrapped fast as fist and tree through
stone-craft of hammers lifted, leveraged arc and aim
falls swiftly—follows gravity
down into the perfect center of the planet
as lightning and its history seeking continuity, and sparks
exact from the strike—the coin—where flan had been
folded thin now on itself an ox of wide-eyed belief—lives
to coin like that to words and liven an anthropology
of hands making more hands meet
Terence Huber is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize. Recent writing appears in Matter, Juked, and DeadHousekeeping. He writes and shines pennies near freshwaters of the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail.