Reginald Shepherd Poems

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
...