Ishion Hutchinson

At nights birds hammered my unborn
child's heart to strength, each strike bringing
...

A furnace in my father's voice; I prayed for the coal stove's
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle
...

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice
...

Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.
For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.
And for Styria: Look at this harp of  blood, mapping.
...

The old trees shake out medals at midday
to the ship paused for a meteor's blunting
glimpse in the windy yellow of the water,
...

They are back, the miniature

explosion of florets, cut away

just days before by the mower.
...

Ground-levelled, behind a line drawn,
he took aim at a circle of precious marbles,
precise, interrupting the passaging ants,
the shot was fired, and if they had known,
...

Late April rain fogs the Wasatch
and turns its wrought peaks steel;
a lightning crack draws a photograph
...

A calm sign in the trees of May: she's dead,
not like this dirge staining the air, her name
recited in the camphor-house where the chalk
figurine, that haberdashery sphinx reclines,
...

My first snow, I open the pages
of Montale, the scent of iron
and light coming out of heads
...

I took my name from the aftersky
of a Mesopotamian flood,
birdless as if culture had shed its wings
...

The train station was a cemetery.
Drunk with spirits, another being entered.
I fanned gnats from my eyes to see into his face.
...

The genie says build a studio. I build
a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum
things. I alone when blood and bullet and all
Christ-fucking-‘Merican-dollar politicians talk
...

The choir that cannot die.
Fish and fennel. Snow. Christmas
tree, clover and pomegranate.
...

A soft light, God's idleness
warms the skin of the lake.
Impeachable, mind-changing
light in the mind of the leaves.
...

I walk the midnight her voice
storm off the island into the house,
the cupboards and closets,
...

The houses are shut, the neighbors gone
to the burning field at the mangrove's edge,
where the heatstroke anthropologist writes
...

Amid ice and granite
sea hush and crash
and the profit and the loss

the prophet xeroxed
in his tamarind shade
and wasp buzz and saw

in the hills crashed leaves
and virgins' suicides
right after the election

and November's Janus
and Pontius Pilate's
maggot snipers' amen

and fortunately I forgot
to be afraid and kept
my fear in the salt

chiseling my face
when I read Keats
and loved the ash

and put two coins
in my right palm
amid the crashed crop

century of wheat
drought rosary terra
cotta Kali reconnaissance

renaissanced my nipples
torpedoed and rocked
the strobe-lit stageshow

the Gorgon's scintillated
romance foiled the constable's
peace and Herodotus

slept as the prophet rose
to his chalice and put
on his mongrel pelt

and it rained softly
and blessed nothing
scarce of breath

and grated nutmeg
and the tyranny of sugar
and pure cream soda

enclosed in cinders
shook burst fizzed
and I found my shape

shifted ciphered raw

my total reversal
my total reversal
my total reversal
...

After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets
of government surveyors looking into roofless

shacks, accessing stunned fowls, noting inquiries
into the logic of feathers, reversed, like gullies still retching; they scribble facts

about fallen cedars, spread out like dead generals on leaf
medallions; they draw tables to show the shore

has rearranged its idea of beauty for the resort
villas, miraculously not rattled by the hurricane's -

call it Cyclops - passage through the lives
of children and pigs, the one eye that unhooked

banjos from the hills, smashed them in Rio Valley;
they record how it howled off to that dark parish

St. Thomas, stomping drunk with wire lashes and cramps,
paralyzing electric poles and coconut trees,

dishing discord among neighbours, exposed,
standing among their flattened, scattered lives for the first time.

It passed through Aunt May's head, upsetting
the furniture, left her chattering something,

a cross between a fowl and a child; they can't say
how it tore down her senses, no words, packing

their instruments, flies returning to genuflect
at their knees, on Aunt May's face, gone soft;

no words, except: Don't fret, driving off,
as if they had left better promises to come.
...

History is dismantled music; slant,
bleak on gravel. One amasses silence,
another chastises silence with nettles,
stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws.

The whole gut listens. The ear winces
white nights in his talons: sinking mire.
He wails and a comet impales the sky
with the duel wink of a wasp's burning.

Music dismantles history; the flambeaux
inflame in his eyes with a locust plague,
a rough gauze bolting up his mouth unfolds,
so he lashes the air with ropes and roots

that converge on a dreadful zero,
a Golden Age. Somewhere, an old film.
Dusk solders on a cold, barren coast. There
I am a cenotaph of horns and stones.
...