Ordering Info.
Night Owl | Insomnia | Not Medea | To Blue | Eye of the Cyclone
Night Owl
Their autumn now an elder just departed,
the mice fly out like leaves in whirling gusts
and spiral underground. Above, one trusts
the sky, recircling to where it had started
to flee, past starry flakes that do not cease
to fall, but spin and scribble in their bliss.
There, a speck, but in vicious white increase,
the night owl shows the earth what heaven is,
its plumes in flurries rippling crease on crease
but whirring down to one half-muffled hiss.
This fugitive, swung up into claw,
skims the brush and trees, flicks back, is gone:
a spark returned to ash. From mountain heights
and down through sheets and screes of mist, the lone
bird strobes and reappears, barely alights
beside a ghost of a knoll. It turns—night’s flaw—
the cloud-globe of its head; and thereupon
(parenthesized upon an ancient bowl
faintly brushed with gray) reveals a Chinese face
which turns back, disappears, bears scarce a trace
among the snow-capped boughs that map the whole.
(Previously appeared in: Asheville Poetry Review)
Insomnia
So I lost touch. All morning a double face
took shape in the window, mine, by the cold
commode. Blue was a bottle on the sill;
eight, a mustache twirling, a leaf.
Teeth caulked, dark cheek a hole, you talked
to me with the orbit of your eye. A leaf
blinked green on orange glass. Cyclops
sun outside, blood…
bricks glued to the pane, batting, beating in.
(Previously appeared in: Poem magazine)
Not Medea
1.
Who floats like a brother through my door?
It is the second of us: In rustled sleeves,
a fingerless boy. The shadows behind
his eyes too large, so many nights he says
our mother beyond the fence was dreaming mad,
twitching in her transparent gown, her chin
a link in the black, her teeth small
sickles of light,
all ten nails
on guard.
2.
She prayed, clenching
the third, hiding the open mouth
of her child, its fizz of hair
in churning dark. No father to fear,
he did not cry.
The void of youth sucked back
its pearls. Lost boat. Old salt. Black dock…
Out, among poisonous
baked sea-things,
so many gulls raised their heads and shrieked.
(Previously appeared in: New Orleans Review)
To Blue
“The universal hue”
–Stevens
Resurrection lightens shades of you,
when dawning in the crater lakes of eyes,
robin’s eggs—their baby blues—reflect sapphirine skies
or lightning cracks a dome of indigo.
As zephyrs buff the noonday Sun, his helium car,
then plum tree leaves and myrtle berries pip
a rain-glazed roof; blue as bluebirds winging through a dip
in crests of spruce, woaded sheep and denim sails flash far.
But what of other dyes and deeps? The wild blue iris
whose lemon blood bleeds down bright violet petals;
Blue Morpho butterfly, late lilac ink, grape metals,
wine dregs, whatever shines dark. In the halls of Osiris,
torches of pewter shed blue on the blades of a giant back.
Then the hydra-night, scaled with stars, flames forth, blue-black!
(Previously appeared in: Plainsongs)
Eye of the Cyclone
Where mountain lightning blinks,
at once your silence strikes. Spattered
sunlight bloods the clocks. Crippled shadows
dart down valleys. Over cracked banana
leaves, I am so afraid if you come back
to my life, you’ll bring yours, the one
the mud sucked out. Black iguanas
claw through bedsheets, grabbling,
restless. Split pods of their eyes continue
ripening in my sleep, my senses drugged
by oceanic rain, your twilight
of cane, a drowned halation. If fever
lights these veins, if I am ill, I am so sick
of sickness. Quick as ships appear, green
electrics slash their rigging, pirate the now pitched
horizon. Gauntleted like a girl against you,
I advance in absent
weather, wondering why
the hole you left me for
widens into this
eye of night, this ever wound-up world,
this wound without end, without wind.
(Previously appeared in: Phoebe)
