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Aaron Belz

Three poems

Efficiency Versus Thought

We looked abroad for an answer.
We zoomed in on ‘if the orange leaves are smitten."
We focused on orange.
We looked abroad to another world,
in which ‘porpoises shimmer in the continental glare."
And we concluded that there
was nothing in orange and nothing in the other image.
There were no hidden meanings locked in smitten or
shimmer, and nothing unseen in the creatures.
So with the help of friends we changed trajectory,
and not only that, we changed velocity.
We asked Katrina if she knew,
and then Daniel Kane, and we went to the beach
and found McManus and asked him.
‘...if frost hides the leaves
and the pump’s concerned handle
won’t lift,’ he said,
and then he trailed off. Something about Florida.
Something about the earth’s weird spinning
and a bonfire’s flares,
the veil of sand, a monument
of ashes there.

I Waited for the Door to Shut

A yellow house contained three girls
The way a hollow tree contains squirrels.
They ate with each other, and stitched
their names into each other’s shirts. Which
one do you want? They all look nice.
‘I’ll take the one with eyes like ice."
Her name is Janice. She wears no bra.
Though her hair is stringy, her skin’s without flaw.
A yellow house contained three girls
The way a hollow tree contains squirrels.

Honeymoon In Altai

Or stroke the good, serious face of a horse! — Solzhenitsyn

At one, we observed a monkey.
At seven, I made lemonade.
At one, I doffed my yellow Kangol.
At seven, we kissed in bed.
At one, we spat in the pool.
At seven, I checked the Weather Channel.
At one, I chopped up cake.
At seven, we ate crab and lettuce.
At one, we froze in our lacies.
At seven, I lay abed.

A graduate of the creative writing program at New York University (1995),Aaron Belz currently teaches writing at Fontbonne College in St. Louis, Missouri. He has published poetry and prose in Wired, Gulf Coast, Mudfish, The Riverfront Times, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere. You can read an aarchive of his new work athttp://www.meaningless.com.
Aaron plans to complete an M.A. in Theology at Covenant Seminary by Spring, 2001. He lives in Dogtown, MO, with his wife Rebecca and their two children, Elijah and Natalie.

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