Poetry
Quantum
If you were to wait
For an act of magic
To happen of its own
Accord, a diamond
Jumping out its box,
You would have to wait
Forever; but shrink the box
A thousand times and more
To something too small
To see and the diamond
Would leap out suddenly
With the whole web of stars
Shifting imperceptibly,
No one would be the wiser:
The sky would keep its color,
The human pigmy would eat
And fuck, and fall asleep
While the dark ladders
Climbed up about him,
In the thicket of hours
On the edge of empty space
“Quantum,” Grain Magazine Vol. 42, Issue 4 (2015): 86.
The Library
I had never seen
such a trunk before
the wet, black bark
sleek like the skin
of an animal in the rain;
and instead of leaves,
its branches bore
drops of a purer water,
liquid orbs that hung
on all the outer edges
of the oak, like glassy
evanescent beads,
their self-contained
synthesis, wholly separate
and lovely, and I lonely
behind the spacious,
terrace windows thinking
the thing’s vastness,
and my own poor words
falling from the object
and objects balanced there
And I became aware
of others, like myself
who want the view
and come to read,
someone now sitting,
or speaking on the phone,
a woman folding
a wet, blue scarf
intent on something else,
and smiling at that sight,
and I pausing,
wondering what to say,
the world growing
with the mind
and becoming wholly
self and real,
like the rain beading
on the tree, bringing
its weight to bear
without our consciousness,
but beginning
to fall down anyway
“The Library,” Grain Magazine Vol. 42, Issue 4 (2015): 87-88.
The Mercurial Man
It takes so much to make
The human engine sing
I’ve been breathless between notes
I’ve felt the metal hum
Of pistons, wheels and gears
Burning the inside,
A fire that demands a price;
And though I reached up
Into the ideal night to pray
My words still fall in scores
A burnt-up year thrown
Like refuse to the side;
I ask: what is its name
That cannot bear the breaks
And runs so recklessly?
He breathes my very breath
But doesn’t have my fear,
And when I close my eyes,
I hear a dark wind blowing
In the corridors of sleep,
The final chamber filled
With the friction of the earth
And all the doorways open:
I ease my ragged chest
I put my little words in place
And push beyond the pain
One foot set before the other
It takes so much to make
The human engine sing
“The Mercurial Man,” Grain Magazine Vol. 42, Issue 4 (2015): 89.