Tom Sleigh Poems

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
...

His head rose like a torch in a tomb.
Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium,
The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out.
...

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass
I wasn't sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,
but he seemed to come apart, not literally
...

I had a blueprint
of history
in my head —
...

Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual
Motion machine of the waves. Everything still
Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody
Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we
...

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar
of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
...

He said, "It is terrible what happens."
And "So, Mr. Tom,
do not forget me"—an old-fashioned ring, pop tunes,
salsa! salsa! the techno-version of Beethoven's
...

The omen I didn't know I was waiting for
pulled into the station the same instant as the train.
It was just a teenage boy busking on the platform,
...

Because the burn's unstable, burning too hot
in the liquid hydrogen suction line
and so causing vortices in the rocket fuel
...

What she is waiting for never arrives
or arrives so slowly she can't see it:
Like the river
bluing silver
...