Matthew Zapruder​

Ghost Birds

for a long time    
I didn’t see them
at first it was all     
just indeterminate
red and black shapes    
like facts     
about which I have    
mixed feelings
but first with my body    
then my mind
I began to perceive    
faint figures striding
the surface as if   
a child holding
a piece of chalk    
at the last moments    
of day had absently    
over all those numbers    
faces and trains    
allowed her hand    
to trace translucent     
sentient monitor beings    
then the man    
with the green hose
at night mostly
washed them away    
I look at them
like I am looking down    
at my life    
in the middle of it    
they seem without heads    
scarily graceful    
I can see a whole life
of travels and doing    
weave such beings    
like thread strung    
around nails
to make shapes    
which was how
I failed geometry
staring down at what
I could not understand    
the painting says    
as we move    
we draw them    
and when we are gone
they go on to finish    
what we could not    
I call them ghost birds   
if you know
what they really are    
don’t tell me
 

(for the painting “Emmy Lou” by Robert McChesney)
​

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Just Deserts

The newspaper said the bank deserved
to pay for its reprehensible transgressions.
 
Even the bankers agreed.
But where to find its giant shadow face?
 
The next feeding isn’t for centuries.
How to force its shadow body?
 
And what about the shareholders 
weeping gently in the alternate boardroom? 
 
Should they have to sell yet another painting? 
Footsteps out in the hall
 
sound gently ominous
like the future at last 
 
had gotten up and begun searching.
In the room with the copier
 
the hum makes me feel 
like the whole building is alive.
 
At night when I should be sleeping
next to my love instead I wander
 
another life where I’m at home
with my television wife.
 
She tells me eat your sorrow.
Those are your just deserts
 
where you must go without water
to beat that dead horse one more time 
 
until it laughs and coughs up 
another monstrously jeweled president.
 

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Matthew Zapruder is the author of four books of poetry and Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017). An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books. He lives in Oakland, CA.