"I put my fists out
and hope
I hit something."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
View on the Arno: Coming About
(after a painting by Thomas
Cole)
Explain immersion, watch the cashmere
sun
extend to edge and vanish so the captain
says. Across the floor,
we spot another mast.
A green hull pulls against the drag, where
bodies
brushed on boats patrol like swans. They're almost
us. We
overlap. In this world, real or psychological,
life's fuzzy toward the
shore. The plot of water stiffens
while we wait, slurred and faceless,
tight inside the boat.
Land-trapped relations wave us in to sleep-a
moon
to stretch across-to cottonwood, weeds that fringe
the frame,
stake the wall. Flax. Curl and swag, green
between shores,
resistant.
Note: we like it here, we like the birds
that never sing
but watch us.
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The Mill Wheel
The last gables fade off the street.
I
count up my failures, gaze at my nails,
the wolf rolls from my
mouth,
bares his teeth-
we love this as much as we hate
it.
Alone, we walk to the park.
Relief comes in a place that's not
ours, on a bench, dogs barking.
Down the street,
a ball is tossed again and again
on the side of
house, the heart's thud.
He's got eyes that look through me
to treadmills, the mule's
dead circle, steps lightly.
Battalions
and bayonets,
thoughts threading the chaos and sulphur
of me. Deep
in it, we're wolves,
checking out people. We stick together.
At
least we have each other,
never sleep, have difficulty
forgetting.
We know all the shopkeepers' names.
I put my fists
out
and hope I hit something.
He asks why I'm blind now.
The walls rust each afternoon,
tints
in the wood are crows,
a necklace, a light shaft,
a glass with water
in it,
a green swath of forest,
bright sun, all I've seen.
Roads, the
arrows shot at birds,
sacred places, old haunts.
The slaughter of
cows in England.
The light the shades keep out.
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