Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

Pushing off on her back out
Into the fishpond's cold
Archaic glitter, my naked wife
Could not have guessed how

High she rode into the noon
Sky, a brightened polestar
Gliding out between nothing
And nothing, between a sun-

Lit vacancy and its ancient,
Reflected, weightless
Hour unrippling back
From the sedges. The just-

Cut grasses fumed around her
Like gasoline, a few
Spent bees dozed above
The compost, and in my arms

The steady thrum of the mower
Carried on, though I'd
Shut it off to sit down
And watch: but so fond of her,

The water parted to take
Her back from that aimless
Sky, where light-
Headed and slippery as a star


...

I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat,
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,

I love you,

I have nothing else to give you,

...

I thought you were a hero,
the first man I ever trusted,
the one who was supposed to mean
safety, no matter what.

Turned out you're a villain,
not the kind from stories,
but the kind who hides in families,
and teaches silence like it's love.


...

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
All all and all, the corpse's lover,
Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.


II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,

...

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go

...

I grew up asking where is he,
the way you ask where is the sun
when the room goes dark.
He was there. He just never looked back.
There was a boy with spike shoes
and a van full of watching eyes
and a mother with a wiper
and a brother who said
I don't know, they just fight all the time.
I was eight. I learned to defend myself first

...

Sister saying—‘Soon you'll be back in the ward,'
sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,'
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine';
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man's, inside his soft brain.

If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time;
more brain mashed because of the probe's braille path;
Lambert Rogers desperate, fingering still;
his dresser thinking, ‘Christ! Two more on the list,
a cisternal puncture and a neural cyst.'

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,'—
the patient's dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient's eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

‘Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,'
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go—till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, ‘ … leave … my … soul … alone … '
to cease at last when something other died.

...

Everything’s looted, betrayed and traded,
black death’s wing’s overhead.
Everything’s eaten by hunger, unsated,
so why does a light shine ahead?

By day, a mysterious wood, near the town,
breathes out cherry, a cherry perfume.
By night, on July’s sky, deep, and transparent,
new constellations are thrown.


...

The whistle bites the morning air,
A sharp and sudden, silver flare.
The dew still clings to blades of green,
Where titans wait, composed, serene.

The leather sphere, a restless heart,
Is where the sudden pulses start.
A rhythmic dance of boot and bone,
In search of glory yet unknown.


...