Questions of identity
footself
or waterself
no other home
my ordinary hours
as keeper of a place
come to question me
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Three tanka
A tiny spider
has spun its web across
the lens of my camera.
I check the memory stick
for pictures of flies.
E.D.
no me to my yes
I thought learnedly
take time to think
whom I thank
oh pill
the cold red beef ages me
Avebury
I go on one foot
into the company of stones
standing like old people
hard as tradition
high stones
prodigious stones
stones growing out of the ground
thick as wonder
stones at the poor house
having their aches
Grave matters
my sepulcher is repaired
by this summer air
it will have every safe
doubt and redoubt
and all evening to be spare
like a bed
Invisible Ink
At first, it’s the palm
& fingers that bear
the purple ink of an hour
in the raspberry patch.
But the berry juice fades
as it dries, even on the palest skin,
or else the body somehow soaks it in:
by afternoon it’s nearly gone
& new, more lurid marks
have appeared on the back
of the hand & half-
way up the arm:
parchment where the dry nibs
tried their points.
Documentary
out the back door
a nightly walk in the fields
a mile or two that lives
now in my camera
taking as old wool
the whole story
Wet walker
lost in my head
I go for a walk
and it raining all the way
my old shoes speak
Time piece
a perfect child
dancing to the clock
only
to answer it
with a tic
but no talk
Default mode network
I understand the night
as a dull noise in my ears
like the bark of a conference
or the body’s own talk
exact as a question
in mathematics
Looking old
I begin to grow old visibly
like a shoe
or a picture of a picture
of a picture
alone I walk in the dusk
up and down
surprised to see a hill there
at the door
Connected
Inside the body
of sleep, each thinking
we are alone & surrounded
by wholly private visions,
failing to recognize
the animal whose footfalls
we hear in place of our own,
touching what we take
for a wall where there are only
other fingers, other skins,
& waking to the smell of heat
on a cool morning in early
summer: I’ve turned into
a tourist in my own life.
I carry a camera from room
to room, alert for any irruption
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
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