Two Poems from the Correspondence

Letter IV: On Reality
 

We crossed the seaward field

with the air heavy against us,

our heels mining canticles from clay.

Look, you said, this is real.

The boats decay on their painters

and no one lives to sail them.

Later I saw a woman walking

past us with a lamp, illuminating

nothing but the stones

that lay broken under our feet.

I wanted suddenly to understand

the world’s darker evidence,

as though the raw wager of death

skilled our souls for greater yield.

Letter V

Love comes in at my bedside

Love lies down beside me

Love has oppressed my tender breast

And love will waste my body

–  trad. Scots, Tifty’s Annie

Before we journeyed upland

you said: only the grave is left

when mortal skin

is shucked from bone,

smoke rising

to curtain trees from the onset

of winter’s lasting kiss.

                                            One meteor

fell and rose like a thought,

searing belt of hydrogen bent

to midnight’s horizon.

From what do we make ourselves?

I see you there, a lynx-like shadow

stalking the perimeter

of solitude.

                        I repeat things obligingly

as if they will save us.

This is no time for absurdities… and yet

our living coil demands

a gambler’s logic, the chances

remote enough so anything

is possible.

                         Thunderheads massing

in the near sky

are a brilliant accident.

You will return on a day that does not exist.

I will call this ‘redemption’.

Originally published in First Light by Giramondo Press.