Martha Silano

Two Poems by Martha Silano

click book
What theTruth Tastes Like
by
Martha Silano

Most Likely a Meteorite Won't be Crashing through Your Roof

so you might as well haul out the vacuum, send a cloud of Windex skyward, lift
a little dust. Thousands of pebbles pelt our planet daily, but unlike
student loans, your balance at Nordstrom's, most burn up

in thermal explosions long before reaching your door. A 27-pound fireball
isn't about to streak across Kentucky, liquidate your laundry.
Your bedroom won't be cordoned off

because a nickel-iron fragment, instead of pulverizing shortly
before impact, vaporized your never-opened copy
of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,

so you might as well get out the Clorox, swirl it around with a brush.
The Big Dipper's staying put, and so is Orion. A wayward comet
isn't heading straight for your birdbath, leaving you

and half of Europe beneath a trillion tons of dirt, so get out the broom,
sweep up what the finches can't possibly hold
between chattering bills. Nothing's

going anywhere but where it's always been going anytime soon—
not the distantly orbiting Pluto, not our own, lowly, stone's-
throw-away moon—so aim a hose at your Galaxy

500, take a rag to the soaring chrome. The universe
is a loaf of cinnamon-raisin rising—
might as well feel right at home.

All Things Want to Float

When their strings finally snap, paper kites resist the urge
to land in wires, on roofs, in the tops of maples and oaks.

When spindles and whelks sway in the shallows,
they don’t desire in the least to be picked up,

buffed, placed in rows beneath glass. In truth,
they’d prefer to flounder forever in the hissing tide.

Knowing full-well the science of sun and dew,
a spider casts her strand between two bushes.

When, at dawn, a human unwittingly passes through,
she dangles (cautiously, proudly) from her weightless arc

of stars. Cottonwood’s fluff, thistle’s pappus, lint confined
to the dryer: all long to hitch a ride to Andromeda.

Not even a thing’s heaviness exempts it, as logs,
tethered to flat-beds, unleash, sniff out fluid routes,

as boats, big as houses, loosen from moorings.
Good thing our brains are buoyant, bathed

in a cranial sea. Good thing, when at last we concede
to gravity, the scent of decay entices the swatted,

the often shooed away. Good thing, though preferring
to flit and bungle without us, they take us, hungrily, in.

_________________________________________________________________________

MARTHA SILANO'S work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Verse, and elsewhere. Her book, What the Truth Tastes Like, (Nightshade Press), was recently featured on the Poetry Daily Web Site. Four of her poems will appear in Amercian Poetry: the Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press, spring 2000).

Martha Silano holds an MFA from the University of Washington, where she studied with David Wagoner and Heather McHugh. She lives in Seattle and teaches English at Edmonds Community College.

ForPoetry