Category: Poetry

Breathchrystal

 
I.

YOU MAY confidently
ragale me with snow:
as often as I strode through summer
shoulder to shoulder with the mulberry tree,
its youngest leaf
shrieked

II.

PATHS IN THE SHADOW-BREAK
of your hand.

From the four-finger-furrow
I root up the
petrified blessing.

 
Paul Celan (1920 – 1970)
 
 

 
A hammer sliding down a clay rooftop,
an old pair of leather shoes scraping over
road dust: the soft torque of breath,
a throat dry as sand, permeate the far wall
of your room with a voice that needs no echo.

Your tile floors are stung with coolness,
and the cry, whose every word is a passage
blazing a Herculean leap, rises from a dozen
hidden rooms around the city. Your sheets
are a blue shroud and the song travels
from district to district from wall to window;
your sun dawns the shadows of water tanks;
the bed is a sundial turning at the centre
of an old stenograph, words crying out as alien
as whale music scratching on your skull.
A horizon of television aerials and satellite dishes
and the relentless mammal lingers there,
its skin above you, the air its bones, the hammer
strokes the slow fury of one who utters God.

As appeared in the full-length collection, Ten Thousand Miles Between Us, the chapbook collection Leaning into the Mountain (Fooliar Press, 2006) and the literary magazine Prairie Journal (2006, No. 47).

 
If you haven’t heard from me by now
I’ve been pinned to a clothesline in a field
where swollen-bellied children hunt acridians
the size of barn swallows. I’ve been wrung out
by obedient hands, my symbols beaten
onto rocks of rivers thick with age.
Where two uncles will hold down a pig
as an aunt cuts, I’ve been put to better use
the ends of me – my quietest corners –
fluttering at the bloodied wrists of one
who hasn’t touched a pen in years.

 
As seen in Prism International.