Poem for Tuesday, July 29, 2014

The Fire Gods Are Always Hungry

This is not the first thing you will learn there, but when you do
learn, the iron will make you sweat, the blood-heavy organs
will make homes beneath your fingernails like parasites in their
hosts. Someone beside you will be kneeling down; this is
for certain. They will pick up a knife, cradle it in their large hand.
They will thumb the blade into a piece of the stomach and toss it
in the stove where the flames are dancing.

You will begin to learn the hierarchy of the land. You will
deconstruct the grass on which you stand, first by the patch, next
by the blade, next by the cells inside each blade. You will never
forget how things once living grazed there under countless suns,
under countless moons, before they made it into the fire.

Poem for Thursday, July 24, 2014

These Things Are Gone

At the slope of the mountain is knee-high vetch,
violet like a storm, fields of it.

You stand there among it all,
coffee on your breath, feeling finite below
the aspen, clenching a rock in your hand.

Before you carve anything in that trunk, think
how these things are gone:

        letters we once saved in drawers,

        our footprints parallel in the snow,

        the flowers that sat on your desk

        over the years, how they all wilted

        in the same surrender.

God, there must have been thousands
of flowers.

Poem for Thursday, July 17, 2014

A Rooftop in Kentish Town

                   From such places,
                   we finally confirm
                   all our suspicions:

yes, the light dies more slowly
farther north, spilling cobalt
instead of black around
the moon;

yes, things get lost in the thickets,
a lap dog yelping from one
of the nameless gardens
below;

yes, when sitting alone on a bench,
implications vary according to
how close to the center
you are;

yes, for reasons lost in the ineffable,
this breeze-sliced night is not
meant to be reduced to a
photograph.