Night watchman
how small are our words
against the whole night
do not lie too long
in one place at night
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Baffled
The house spider
was on the inside
& didn’t budge
when the phoebe flew up
& clung to the window screen,
jabbing fruitlessly
at a meal turned to metal —
or rather, subdivided
into orderly
impenetrable holes,
as in a physics
textbook account
of the structure of matter.
Chalk lines on a blackboard,
rows of blank faces
at their desks.
Acting casual
might I people the street
who am only one man
having nothing but a translation
of a laugh
Ad hoc
where to be the author of myself
where to be this out-take
Shedding
all afternoon in the shed
my one habit
like a hat
made for rough air
Foggy morning: four quick takes
Foggy morning porch.
Two blowflies are fucking
on my knee.
Foggy July morning:
I can’t focus on anything
but that one red branch.
Foggy morning, late July.
I count the bird songs to see
which ones are missing.
Sun through fog:
the trees’ shadows stretch
half-way to the ground.
Aedes vexans
Grace
On the last day of summer,
drifting slow as hope through
the thick air of evening
she chances into
the plume of CO2 from
my breath, follows it upstream
to my arm’s telltale heat.
She hovers, then slowly sinks
the last few inches straight
down into my pelt with all
her landing gear extended,
proboscis going into the skin even
as the slight craft of her body
still rides the hairs down,
her feet stretching one
Nowness
time is only
one second old
a print on water
the present draft
Conditional
mirth and words alter
who I find within
my heart beginning to falsify
what I have done
like moving to a different home
and a hard bed
Usage du temps
The aging transport ship
floats motionless
as the Newtonian surface of what
they still sometimes call outer space
dissolves around it.
The smallest of shudders
passes through the hull
& into the sleeping bodies
of the convicts,
the constellations change
in the monitor at the far end
of the almost-deserted lounge
where the chief engineer,
himself a convict, is reading
in an almost inaudible whisper
from Jean Follain’s
Cartography
in my new map
in green ink
the kingdom of heaven
like a paper heart
words and signs
for park and garden
on the way home
to supper
Resourceful
my wing
my promise
my good ear
my wife
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