Lisa Russ Spaar Poems

Return to me, cleft
of living light, scissure
in darkness, fierce,
...

Ancestral slosh, black forest
of bridge trestles, syrupy rivers of South Jersey,
O Lutheran, O German School, O being Shunned
...

Bated ruby, guru occult,
you show yourself to us
after we— in gambit of breed,
of anchorite, of wind-thieved
...

Like a balcony, seized from behind,
held up by gods no one trusts,
deity of pseudonym, of crush, ransom notes,
ropes, lies. Sometimes abandoned
...

When my daughter fights on the phone
with her boyfriend, even her side
of the story unintelligible as my pain -
...

Tantric, this cobwebbed plot,
fish-net snare hung high in goblin air:
I'm lost in love, a mazed speck
of stunned flesh, sun-puzzled, heat-eaten,
...

If ever more ravened, junked, numb-sconced
I could not recall it, sopping in aftermath
dusk's blossom bock, ink-musk ale
...

O silk, my throat closing around a sob.
That fly again, minute leaden tank, thread-hooves,
busy, busy, to whom I mean nothing.
Relief in this. Yet to me he's singing beside the dugout, the ditch,
...

Glazier season, thin ice,
lens annulling clavate buds,
rescinding crocus silks,
making me see time,
...

Always the scythe of hours,
now, as everywhere,
even in loral light of late winter
...