Daytime moon
an unexamined moon
would dissolve into noon
into any enemy of change
the wren is so matter-of-fact
and I still and cold
as a dead clown
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Lynx rufus
Woken by thirst & a hot gaze
from the mouth of the shelter: sun,
or mother dangling some new,
wet chew-toy for her grown kitten?
The dream visions slink
back behind the rocks, where
it’s always night. Yellow eye,
help me look for a drink under
these shelves of angled light.
Water has no scent of its own.
After dark, it’s simple to track it
by its purr: every large ravine
has a throat, a pulsing vein.
Its surface trembles, the loveliest of pelts.
But sometimes too there’s water
on top of the mountain,
Cellar hole
a cellar in the wood
kept all this while
under a firethorn
like a protest against disquiet
to trepan the general catalogue
of the lost
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills…
death and torture
in the news tonight
escaping the prison
of what is certain
I drive toward the mountains
which make so low a sound
Settling down
I had an intimate discourse
with three or four lands
will I be wholly prepared
to set things in order
to get things in order
to take just one
particular ground
Unmapping
show me the city before the city
like another lie in the lay of the land
a foot is the greatest indignity done to a stone
a kind of affront
as if appointed to meet
on the holy road
Lepidopterist
I wait like a guitar
for the sacrament of an ear
nobody can tell
the truth of a moth
lost in the busy night
Light verses
light on a fence
I believe in the clock
light on the wharf
we consume to no purpose
Cloistered
where I shut myself in
the night lay open
that impossible hand
I read and read and read
Monochrome
I would draw
this winter in chalk
but for a crow
Second hand
mould writing an abstract letter o
over the book
I am scraping out
such glory
The Sycamore
The young veteran — a double
amputee — is still learning how
to pilot a wheelchair. He stops
a few feet from the concrete lip
of the pond, gazing across at
a sycamore shining in the sun.
His eyes travel down the trunk
& into the water, the shadow
going one way, the reflection
another. A carp slides under
the flesh-toned bark. Meanwhile,
his flannel shirt has turned into
a screen for reflected sunlight,
dazzling the mallards crowding
around his chair. He glances
down at the dancing shadows
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