Bruce Bond Poems

If you are going there by foot, prepare
to get wet. You are not you anymore.
You are a girl standing in a pool
of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.
...

Dear guitar, my Cyclops, my raft,
my drunken casket, my doll
without arms, my willow, my ink,
...

It's the lantern that we look to most,
there in the shape of a man with his dark hat
and radiant head, his arms cut short,
...

So many grains, so many little tombs
of dust. It keeps us humble: the deceased,
always slightly larger than their time,
larger than us, no less, just as a breeze
...

Lynchpin of the singing wheel,
you with the silver of your call
so tiny and, yes, unmusical
...

What is it you forget in your vigil,
cell after cell like petals on the grave
of first days, so often strange, your veil
of skin ruffled, renewed, as if you grieved
...

To the locusts that blur the lyres of their shells,
I leave my blindness at the end of day.
To the distant whistle of the train at dusk,
...

Scat singing for the sleep deprived—
it's what the critics called his
final music, his ship that plowed
...

No larger than a bird coffin,
the kind that opens its one wing
onto a sky it cannot take to,
...

As the mobile of planets wheeled over my crib,
their shadows darkened the yellow walls:
...