Lower your eyes. When beauty invades your life with such force, it can destroy you. The two ants hurrying along next to the soles of your feet are burying their summer dreams deep in the ground. The load they are carrying will not crush them. They have measured their strength accurately. Your shadow melts into…
After the smooth up-pull the car dove fish-efficient in the tractor-trailer’s wake. By then the thick wheel cuts had tapered down the long, curved grade then vanished, leaving undulations in the drifts. All the way from Montreal through French-toned Vermont we’d held to mostly all alone through night-time Massachusetts, the Berkshires rhythmic now, the rise…
Then, the future was glaucomic, the bore through mangrove in the dugout slow. I recall the water in its color tannic. I see now an olive wake dissolving from the churn work of the screw. A time would come — it seems it has — to redecipher, understand again the meaning of the motor’s open…
Air an instrument of the tongue / The tongue an instrument / Of the body … — Robert Pinsky “Burro Banton a di only veteran artist that go Europe and open the festival and close the festival. Him get two pay.” — Peter Metro, dancehall reggae legend Hearing Burro trace the sky in couplet, the…
(Amy Clampitt, for you) Casual. Flitting skin off cucumbers over a wide metal bowl, catcher for the harvest from the summer market, that cosmos of virtue — jug bands, frailed banjos, picked mandolins, tomatoes as a toddler sees them, mitts of stars — I feel a comet trail of shiver where my sternum is, that…
I. All time indeterminate now so this might be late or early and hardly a day in itself. Call it infernal nevertheless with my first move a descent into air thick with lamentation. I mean tension in the clock as it works towards sunrise and fear becomes natural law. * Starlings in the tree opposite…
After the hurricane my father walked beside me in the woodland broken down; he’d known it as a child and now his wife, my mother, on the far side of the wall we came to in the end, the churchyard wall, had left him to complete his time alone. Wave after breaking wave of shredded…
American linden also American lime of the family Basswood (tiliaceae un- pronounceable virtually for this layman) but mine opposite keeps that quiet and presents facts as they appear – being a handsome street-shade tree with elephant bark in hard scaly ridges and russet twigs wandering into green until, when flowering, it fills with bees giving…
Unfinished dares avoiding rules override Avernus. Were you wrong about everything to say anything? Plausible laws insufficient to our lives are blowback For the myth of liberty. Depeopled palace trumpets Silent where they were once wild for slaughter calls. Sons and daughters commandeer our mercy for grief Discerning: Who would harm a stranger harms me….
Phantom intelligence of the soul knows touch echoes Trace gestures prone to outcompose their originals — Springs and veils marvel at their sudden plainness, Nincompoops with tongs abandon the whole shebang. My stupefaction remains wholly blunt and untamed, That once familiar summer will ripen and destroy all Backward glances aimed at divining an elusive theme,…
Approached each day ready to return Knowing no knowledge in safety — Day eventually discovering day, Nothing is forever new tomorrow. All along songs that need to grow On us spring into action unlocking Stolen loves still too much to bear. An altar of air colors how hard this Is to say — your true…
Movements toward the unexceptional, Benediction of the voice’s mannering Vagrancy expires to tilt at beatific winds Tacking ships into a salty harbor of blood. Let us dispense with muttering receipts From Pentecostal fire in the chimney Where the jackdaw builds its nest of straw For weekend escapes to the empyreal stark. Ghosts zone out upon…
