Gravity
    Bryan Walpert

A valley for light
to follow, the way a hand
will follow the curves of the body,
then, while the moon lolls night's circumference,
two follow the banks of sleep to meet in the bed's sloped center.





Birds on a Wire

    Bryan Walpert

They're numb to the buzz beneath
their feet: the pulse of mourning

returned to component parts,
particles squeezed through copper,

ideas about you and me and the space
between us bridgeable

by a sentence that, scrambled,
receives a second substance.

Bell would spend summers
in Halifax and one season attempted

to send his words over light waves,
a telephone based on good weather

and mirrors. Imagine: He'd watch
his words sent off, the opposite

of what he meant. It didn't catch on.
Still, the sounds of a foreign language

hang between us; and even when
the news is bad, they don't fly.



Bryan Walpert is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Denver. His poems recently have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, The Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, and Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan 2000). He is seeking a publisher for his manuscript, Uncorrected Proofs.
 
 
 
 

In Posse: Potentially, might be ...