never more than
For John High
a pathway strewn with blue stone
vestiges of emptied stars
faces
the lost boys always
in reiteration a broken angel
hunger, and turnips, and one wing extended
into a forest
of wandering words and word chasms, bees
forming a distinction
shadow notes extinguished in the blood cry of a flowing moon
past the echo of bells past the cliff’s imprint on impatient clouds
the garden, its wooden hoe
and names
spoken
white stalks, deep in the soil
Letter from the Blank Page
Dear End of the Day,
If this is Monday, there is no reason to examine the wreckage: the weight of wings always sorrows the back. Once the cock crowed half a dozen times before the sun rose, and there was no factory recall, only the peppery taste of nasturtium on the tongue.
Not today, though. Did I mention that the color of grass has sequestered itself in the wind and petitioned for dissolution? Throwing itself on the mercy of its most frequent witness, a host of un-shuttered windows and into the squint of. Shortly thereafter, it was determined that the glass within the frame represents its own most immaculate correction.
With new fault lines occupying the cellar, above the marsh the gasses are undifferentiated from these or any other wanderings. And against the onslaught, an abundance of edges, with no room for compromise in the telling.
If this is Monday, there is no reason to examine the wreckage.
Intervention
Like everything else is, it
is split hairs at the root of it, is
mostly squandered in the local mud of it,
but spectral, still, and quivering now, even when,
thinking of the thud of it, it swoons into the thrill
of it, the thought of the calligrapher’s sword
being drawn from it, the moment to become
or not become untouchable to it, before it
mattered most to the eyes of it or tongue, it was
that which once fell swoopingly and sunk
into the quicksand of it, swollen like a squid
with ink and forced into the lying with the lamb
of it, a matted membrane of it foresworn as the moment
of the truth of it, as if it had become the sunken
into squalor breath of it, or simple crooked swathes of it,
the bells of it, what passed for spoils of war
was it before the wax and wane, what it is
now, like nothing else, whatever was.
Editor’s notes: John High, the poet whom the first poem in this series is dedicated, has been featured in the pages of Witty Partition, Cable Street’s parent journal, here and here. Other work by Lisa Bourbeau appears in this issue here and here.
***