Dead Dog's Jaw

I read Ko Un today
       the news of flowers
       eases the poverty of this world*

still
even as I walk the town
to chase the shivers through my skin
I feel like a dead dog’s jaw

slowly
season after season
days of rain after days of rain
it sinks between the thorn bush roots
deaf in its own slow winter
even to the blackbirds scratching
in last year’s leaves above

you could say I do to time
what a bone white glacier does
flatten out the land beneath it
holding back the centuries
in my dog’s jaw sleep

but today I think
I heard the warm flesh sutra
it reaches that deep down

along the train embankment
the world flows through the apple blossom
       all of it
       one stamen at a time

*) Ko Un, The News of Flowers
Note: some edits since first posted, thanks DB, JTS. 

The waiting song, the crow song

this is the waiting song
the crow song in the branches
the dog song clicking nails on asphalt
it is the high heel song
the duck song and the game song
the car song at the traffic lights
the spring sun song
          unzipping my coat
          on a warm park bench

the path's a hard black ribbon
blown in from somewhere else
hardly a barrier between us
          a dead seagull and me

behind him is the pond
          the wind scatters handfuls of diamonds
          on its murky thrift shop mirror skin
and then poplars
and the new brick church
a road I think and football fields
etcetera etcetera and all around
          the city

the city that lies face down
in the salty clay
whose fingers still stroke rivers
that it drank six hundred years ago
breathing fear and money (as cities do)
pumping a thousand million whispers
along thread thin arteries
back and forth into the world

but you all still die though?
the seagull asks

and it rises from the deep roots
from the sand grains and
the diatoms
          the waiting song
          the breath of birth

          of springtime

who am I to defend all that?
who am I to answer?

Three mostly imaginary immigrant people I see around sometimes

Male / around 70 / Mendeleev beard on a match stick frame. Every time I see him, he's walking either to or from the supermarket to get a single can of beer. His gait is best described as 'slanted'. He is the only man alive who still knows all 160.000 lines of his people's national epic by heart in their original Trans-Uralic language isolate. His eldest son is called after its hero but he's in Hamburg now. The boy works in the stockroom of a brewery and is married to a German girl.

Female / at least 40+, but quite a bit older than she looks, I'd say / a very lean North African lady, perpetually wearing running gear. When she was 23, she got kicked out of the Sorbonne for unspecified infractions (widely rumoured to have been either a reckless lesbian affair with the wife of a famous academic-turned-politician or a string of acts of lighthearted left-wing terrorism). Nowadays she makes a comfortable living, trading Aztec pottery online.

Male / 50-ish most likely / actually ties his ragged jeans with rope. He's Iraqi of Sunnite stock but for years now has been living under the assumed Kurdish name of the family patriarch he shot point blank in '83. It was chalked up as just a political murder; really though, he killed the man because he could and wanted to. I saw him once, whistling at his own reflection in a city bus window.