Craig Steiger

It is enough that the world
Takes me for its own
Gathers me in dark woods
By rock creeks
...

With his piddling bow
He comes to the range
To approach that inner meridian
That makes him one
...

Behold the blue sea-swell

That lifts itself a glass morning
...

This American manhood,
Aren't we just the toast of the earth
With our muscular SUVs
And SuperDuty trucks,
...

I too sifted
Down the dark seductions of life,
Lacerated by faint perfumes
In sundown hallways,
...

The cat stuck high in the tree

Will surely be the death of me
...

A full moon rises huge & yellow

Over great tracts of tundra
...

You juss' a throwback
Poor poet hackysack

Your chromosomes don't jibe
...

The wayward squirrel
Who lingers in morning sun
...

A date with death
On the high Wyoming plains
Premonition in dreams,
December when the ground lay bare
...

After days down freeways
I come home to frosty woodsides
Where a night of snow
Has graced every surface,
...

Driving out Jackass Flat Road
Deeply chilled in December
Spending an warmth-free afternoon
With the good grey poet
...

The first faint cawing
Stopped my sawing-

I rushed to a clearing
...

towers blink red

across Galveston Bay-
...

Even as we struggled
To keep the wheelbarrow upright
To be alive in the sunlight
That is the thing
...

With parts from the wreck

A roadside crucifix
...

how I came to love

the way she chinned her pillow
...

I was alive in the sunlight today
Crouched behind a cosmos
of blue poppies,
a wind moved
...

The little knot we carry
On our softskinned bellies
Symbolises our warm blood
Is inherited,
...

...