Poetry

         for Mark Tredinnick, in north Cornwall For each turn off a main-er           road onto a minor, each place                     less signed, more inside itself (the turned back           of a corrugated shed,                     its roof weighted with tires, three milk churns on their concrete shelf) you could believe you’re one step closer to the…

This is not a small poem about loss or disappointment. This is a runnel with no use for a bridge, a curtain wall with no dead load, a road with no bend to my door. This is a forest with no trees. This cannot be foreseen. This is me, opening my mother’s spool box, taking…

Because something as broken and hurt as this should never be put on show, we buried it. No blight of sun nor weight of soil nor bleach of rain, we thought, would ever let it thrive. But given a month or so, somehow it shouldered back into the light. One seed head, sallow, awned, pitted…

As when icy illness ends that you never expected    Could possibly end, and the terrified body, enveloped In warm water, reposes, you could kiss every child on the hand,    Every leaf in the forest, every stone of the wall. A low moan escapes The mouth. Melancholia, the accompanying spirit, is departing with    Her ratty wings…

                                                       Maybe I should be locked in a cage in the center of the village, a sign the judge ordered me to carve hung around my neck to warn the children…

           In homage to Harry Houdini Driven to stunt after stunt:     handcuffed in water, buried underground you would emerge triumphant.     Cops double-locked their cells but you broke out. Rivals without your ingenuity,     never collected that ten thousand dollars you laid down. You shook off any…

I’d melt in your houses. I hide in blue shadows, appearing only at night— a bride in a glittering veil, pale and shining as if lit from inside. You offer me a snowman: a frozen dummy with eyes of coal. But I want a husband with a heart in my bed, who’ll lie with me…

Morning sunlight streaking through the blind lit the jagged scratch from a roller skate in the kitchen floor’s jazz-patterned lino which I filled with putty and tried to hide with my art-school oil paints in every shade of tan and brown, cream and yellow. Such glowing yellow: the color of a slice of corn bread,…

Here, where the old Industrial School was and then the porn-film sheds, stands the last lamp before the water. Dead as he’s been these ninety years the lamplighter on his beat walks with ladder on shoulder. Above the Mardyke Steps and the donkey track he fixes ladder to pole, stands back then climbs nimbly into…