POEMS BY MICHAEL TOPA: UNFINISHED BUSINESS
The Street Cleaners
Talking with a friend
Downtown outside late at night
Blur of passersby
You don’t see what is
Happening but someone takes
The moments away
I think I’m one of the street cleaners myself: I sweep the past into my novels, not as it happened, but tidying it up until it fits the story.
The Headhunter of Hands
At night
I go down to the lake
And search for your hands
I find a certain antiquity
In bones tinkling under the moon
Stone flowers amid lacustrine trees
In the blue-baited dawn
The bandicoots return to the shaggy black moss
Growing quietly on the north side of a tree
They stuff what is left
Of your hands
Into their pouches.
Lacustrine trees! blue-baited dawn! I’d like to go there to finish the business and be happy.