Reginald Shepherd

and green plaid shorts goes strolling
through Juneau Park at eight o’clock
with only a hooded yellow windbreaker
for protection, trawling the bushes after work
...

At that time I didn't understand
snow, the absence inside July,
water and what holds the water
in. Heard "It takes more than a forest
...

for Chris


I'm a penny fallen from heaven's
...

For his sake drifting away from the true
windlessness, torn sails the aftermath
of him: white canvas suffering too vaguely
from the beautiful agreeing with these arguments,
...

In that year I was perfect
and in mourning

Blue glass tends to replace
...

Look: I am building absence
out of this room's air, I'm reading suppositions into
summer's script snarled on a varnished floor.
It looks like a man. That knot's his hand
...

See my colors fall apart? Green
to yellow with just one shade gone,
the changing tints of your sun-struck eyes,
if there were sun. Today the prism held to mine’s
...

What will I call you
when you are gone?
How will I know your name?
Little star, reflection
...

When I was ten (no, younger
than that), my mother tried
to kill herself (without the facts
there can't be faith). One death
...

And then I said, That's what it means
to testify: to sit in the locked dark muttering
when you should be dead to the world. The muse
just shrugged and shaded his blue eyes. So naturally
...

Then I am sitting naked on damp grass
(it rained in my yesterday)
while two white gentlemen
in black frock coats share lunch
...

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body
master snapping masts in half, absent
winds’ workmanship: what window
will I look you through, what brook, stream
...

Today I am afraid of ghosts, the things
I searched for in you, sang of you.
Shining hazard, roundabout,
piece of myself you’ve never seen: never
...

The way air is at the same time
intimate and out of reach
(a void with light inside it
turned on a wheel of wheres)
...

Distance is money just out of reach,
a kindness like rain-laden clouds
that never drops its coins. Epochs
of fossilized trees crawl rusting hillside
...

If this world were mine, the stereo
starts, but can't begin
to finish the phrase. I might survive
it, someone could add, but that
...

You disappear again, December sun
turns light to ice, fracture
of frozen stars responsible for months
of snow. Now that you're gone it's winter:
...

Listened but couldn't hear
the subject hissing: looked up to
pages of stuttering rain (it tastes
...

no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk
and foraging for small seeds
My mother was the clouded-over night
a moon swims through, the dark against which stars
...

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
...