CROCUS

How can such softness bear the strength
to throw off a winter's weight of snow?
Stubborn memory in stubborn root
heliotrope heliotrope
quick purple delirium
covering, pushing back
these too-close hills to mountains,
distant, perfect
as a child might draw them--
mountains you can count the flowers on.

© Olga Costopoulos (e-poem) (home)

CROCUS is from Muskox and Goat Songs 1995,
published by Ekstasis Editions, $12.95 Cdn
P.O. Box 8474, Main Postal Outlet,
Victoria, B. C., CANADA
V8W 3S1

BONE SCAN

Do bones scan like poetry,
their long-lined angular rhythms singing,
the gamma particles dancing
for an unknown radiologist
who might report that my bones
have taken up the phosphates
with warm, excited attraction?
Is this the ultimate introspection?

The technician says lie still, relax.
But I tingle all over knowing
this flawed poem is my body
this flawed body is my poem
formed in my dark unknowing.
Read head to foot, seeing only
the luminous dark vascular maze
which knows its way but not itself--
feeling below the words
but beyond sensation.
Out of touch's touch, the unknown
is born in the crimson marrow.

© Olga Costopoulos (e-poem) (home)