P o e m s
“Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections — language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than
we do about who are, what we are.”
—Jane Hirshfield
Walking Underwater
There is this quietness that hangs over North America.
As if all the days were double-glazed against themselves.
It’s uncanny. Tectonic. A kind of grief, a kind of pain. …
Time Passages
Once, a while before
time began to count,
I stood on shore with a girl and saw a petrel …
The Sword & the Pen
So, have you been doing much sword-
fighting lately?
The boy asks because,
you know, fathers live forever …
When the Panic
When the silence grows shrill in you and won’t be said;
When the sadness grows deep in you, like winter, but will …
The Horse
She’s at a loss, my daughter, in the drawing
She makes, a girl and her horse, as a gift
For me—a frontispiece she pens, …
Panic Very Softly, Love
RAIN HAS PAINTED out the top of Snake Hill,
and cloud has got loose in the orchard.
But no one’s tipped the horses off that the rest of the day’s been cancelled. …
End of a Lonely Day
End of a lonely day
spent watching rain
Showers lift and fall …
Grief Wears a Body
GRIEF WEARS a body,
and today she stands in mine. …
Pavane; Or, a Mouthful of Bright Blue Prayers
I may be sitting inside the best afternoon
The world has put on since the Permian
Extinction.
Have You Seen
… the way the trees—that sclerophyll fraternity on the mountain—swarm
Like Dante’s shades as you drive among them in the rain on the way down …
But Did You Ever Feel
But did you ever feel
more like a species
Of happiness, an inhabitant of tides, an oystercatcher among oysters …
What The Light Tells
Most of it is black, and the beginning goes on
And on; endings, too, it seems, don't end.
Grief you never do will never stop
Undoing you. …
A Gathered Distance
Across the harbour’s fetch,
a distance grows, a loveliness
Of limbs. …
Eclogues
The first ten steps from the house to the shed, I break
two or three promises the night has strung
like spiders’ webs across my path. …