D. A. Powell Poems

Among the rain and lights
I saw the figure 5
...

Something seems to have gnawed that walnut leaf.
You face your wrinkles, daily, in the mirror.
But the wrinkles are so slimming, they rather flatter.
...

this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon: she is butterfly
brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono
...

the bare-backed barback
in the bear bar's back bar
barebacked with a bare bear
who was also a barback back there
...

if you didn't mind the bible
you'd surely mind the belt
...

this is the track I've had on REPEAT all afternoon: she is butterfly
brilliant riband, rice flour face, silken, even her voice a sashed kimono

if I were foolish like her:
but aren't I foolish like her
spotting the coil of smoke and the billowed sail
against the verge of sky

simple on the rise surveying the anchorage: simple me, signal me
dreading the confident assumption of return, dreading more
uncertain tone to come, the thinning notes, performance
too close to my own impatient—swells, a surge: sick wind

but the emotion is, after all, an artfully conjured gesture
arranged marriage between a past ache and frail woodwinds
I could skip ahead
could break the inconsolable loop
of harbor, waiting, overlook, waiting, inevitable waning eye

troubled robins, once more in the handkerchief trees
once more, brief aquarelle of triplet lilies, blue as willowware
in that interval before his embrace falters, stuck, founders
[shuffle play] such a pitch of tenderness in the voice
such an awful lot of noise
...

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils
the redwinged blackbirds convened
vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air

the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward
then gone
the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth

jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge
vivid tips of oleander
white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be



here is another in my long list of asides:
why have I never had a clock that actually gained time?
that apparatus, which measures out the minutes, is our own image
forever losing

and so the delicate, unfixed condition of love, the treacherous body
the unsettling state of creation and how we have damaged—
isn't one a suitable lens through which to see another:
filter the body, filter the mind, filter the resilient land



and by resilient I mean which holds
which tolerates the inconstant lover, the pitiful treatment
the experiment, the untried & untrue, the last stab at wellness

choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure
cataclysmic climate change
or something akin to what's killing bees—colony collapse

more like us than we'd allow, this wondrous swatch of rough



why do I need to say the toads and moor and clouds—
in a spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket's sound

and delight I took in the sex of every season, the tumble on moss
the loud company of musicians, the shy young bookseller
anonymous voices that beckoned to ramble
to be picked from the crepuscule at the forest's edge

until the nocturnal animals crept forth
their eyes like the lamps in store windows
forgotten, vaguely firing a desire for home

hence, the body's burden, its resolute campaign: trudge on

and if the war does not shake us from our quietude, nothing will

I carry the same baffled heart I have always carried
a bit more battered than before, a bit less joy
for I see the difficult charge of living in this declining sphere



by the open air, I swore out my list of pleasures:
sprig of lilac, scent of pine
the sparrows bathing in the drainage ditch, their song

the lusty thoughts in spring as the yellow violets bloom
and the cherry forms its first full buds
the tonic cords along the legs and arms of youth
and youth passing into maturity, ripening its flesh
growing softer, less unattainable, ruddy and spotted plum



daily, I mistake—there was a medication I forgot to take
there was a man who gave himself, decently, to me & I refused him

in a protracted stillness, I saw that heron I didn't wish to disturb
was clearly a white sack caught in the redbud's limbs

I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until—
daylight, don't leave me now, I haven't done with you—
nor that, in this late hour, we still cannot make peace



if I, inconsequential being that I am, forsake all others
how many others correspondingly forsake this world



light, light: do not go
I sing you this song and I will sing another as well
...

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road
its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?
—this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle
and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white

past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would
—poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves



I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:
the smell of a bare neck in summer
a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs
the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill

in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields
the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty

if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them
anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract

the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks
—that was all



and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence
in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches
where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away

I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains
the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing
the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted
and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart

for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:
a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink
a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass



we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs
the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing
and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing



you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink
half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green

you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us.



you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song


—for Haines Eason
...

shepherdboy? not the most salient image for contemporary readers
nor most available. unless you're thinking brokeback mountain:
a reference already escaping. I did love a montana man, though no
good shepherd

rather: a caveman, came spelunking into that grotto I'd retreated to

what light he bore illumined such small space—physically, temporally

and did he have a grove of beech trees? no, no grove
but together we found an old-growth stand of redwood

we gouged each other's chests instead of wood: pledges that faded
he was not cruel nor I unwitting. but what endures beyond any
thicket?


example: he took me to the ocean to say farewell. I mean me: farewell
to ocean
the ocean, for that matter, to me. us both fatigued, showing signs
of wreckage

and that man I had loved stood back from the edge of things

he did not hold me

I expected not to be held

we all understood one another: shepherd understudy, ocean, me


and did he go back to his fields and caves? yes, but they were gone
strip-mining, lumber, defoliant, sterile streams: you knew that was
coming

weren't we taught some starched sermon: the pasture awaits us
elsewhere


back up a moment: the forest you mentioned—remember, instead of a grove?

untouched for the most part. some human damage, but not ours

we left no mark, not there in the midst of those great trees:
not in the concentric rings that might have held us far past living

instead, I put that man, like so many others, on paper—
a tree already gone from sight where once it had drawn the eyes
upward: the crest of a mountain. crumpled thoughts, crumpled love


shepherdboy, do you see the wild fennel bulbs I gathered for you
olallieberries, new-mown grass, the tender fruits of the coastal fig?

I put them on paper, too, so fragile. for nothing is ever going to last


For Haines Eason
...

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself
and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white
as god's own ribs


what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of the
honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats
foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me
by the nape


guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs
and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him
on my tongue


silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided
preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our
sleepy eyes


For Haines Eason
...