The Time You Need

It has to be enough.
The mind zooms in, zooms out,
zooms to the death room, back
to bed to sleep. Ten years.
I did okay last night. It’s still
last night, I did okay.
You hear a music you’ve just got to play.
You lick yourself
like you’re a dog or stamp,
a gesture made against the mind.
Your fur-lined tongue
is dry all night. Ten years
your mind zooms back, zooms back
a singing room, his eyes awake
for one last time. For talking
when the tongue’s too dry.
A little square sponge on a stick
is all you have for all
that pain. It has to be enough
to mind.

Mediaeval Sentences

We may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,
the desperate peasants said.

We hanged the peasants.
Peasants may be hanged for a sheep.

For a lamb as well?

For a lamb, as for a sheep.

Peasants may well be desperate.
Maybe a May lamb?

Maybe, we said, maybe . . . .

The peasants said:
We be peasants, desperate for a sheep.
May the lamb be a sheep.

Well said, we said.

Desperate be hanged,
the peasants said.

Be as desperate as we,
said said peasants.

May desperate peasants be well peasants.

May we, the peasants, be well!

California poet Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, winner of the Hilary Tham Prize; I will not kick my friends, winner of the Elixir Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her chapbook Cat’s Tongue was published by Texas Review Press. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, Cincinnati Review, and Colorado Review. She received fellowships from Maison Dora Maar, Cill Rialaig, James Merrill House, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, and Ralph Johnston Fellowship.