Arran
Harbor at sunset.
A boy fires his air gun
into the water.
A bus and car
squeeze past each other
at the standing stone.
Crowded campground.
A fat herring gull walks
between the tents.
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
England by Rail
i.
A crane in a scrap metal yard
unclenches a great, magnetic claw.
Breast-shaped mounds of soil
sit two fields away from the pit,
a future fish pond.
Gulls glean in the plow’s dark wake.
A large, white dog follows
two boys along a dry creek
while we in our fast train
hurtle backwards over the sleepers
in their gravel beds.
ii.
A signal goes out
& we creep slowly through the night
so the driver can inspect the track.
Winter Road
Asphalt
fades to white
from weeks of salt.
Ice stitches
jack-knifed feathers
in the ditch
beside
the gray ridge
the snowplow made.
Phragmites rocks
in the wake
of passing trucks.
Kenosis
Mid-January, & the bear
who hasn’t had
a meal in two
months, & won’t for
another three, half-
wakes to chew
sticks into soft
chips—bedding
for the cubs who
will soon be born
& squall
& nurse.
She may leave the den
to eat snow or merely
dream of it.
Her heart beats
The remains of the cold
The fever & the cold
are odd bedfellows.
Even goldfinches turn down the heat
during their autumn molt.
I lie fallow, letting bloom
a virus that slipped in
under cover of affection
& now withers in the ditch.
White Christmas
Nothing is more innocent than snow.
It says: I am not of your world.
We wonder: What child is this,
what wool, what milk?
Then we look back & see our footprints
multiplying behind us.
Maybe this is nothing but a white flag.
But whose turn is it to surrender?
New snow falls & fills the footprints in.
We feel we are being measured for immaculate shoes.
Seahenge
tree upended
made to flower downward
into the dark sky of the dead
who feed & return
who stand in circles
& spring after spring resprout
leaves of malachite
Wake
It doesn’t seem right,
looking at “the old moon
in the arms of the new,”
the dark part glowing
a bleary orange
with earthshine,
that we can still emit
so much radiance.
Nocturne
December night. Meteors streak
through the bare crowns of oaks.
I watch the sky as if it were the sleeping face of a dreamer.
All that blazing action without a sound!
And the longer I look, the more unfamiliar it becomes,
wholly itself & yet possessed. Wild. Vulnerable.
I want to be present the way an oak is present
& stretch empty arms into the void.
Nipple
Mouthpiece
for the body’s instrument.
Its silence is another language.
Mountain peak.
It makes its own
wet weather.
Mouse-pink
& sensitive as a newborn
through old age.
Missed bit
of a continent submerged
in the unconscious.
Mouthpiece.
The scuba diver
can’t speak.
Bullet Casing
Squat bottle.
Who drained its amnesia?
Organ pipe.
Why emit so high a C?
Empty bud.
Where did the flower open
its red petals?
Molted exoskeleton.
What imago wouldn’t flee
such a narrow corpse?
Eyecup
The blue plastic eyecup
of my mote-ridden boyhood
still sits on the top shelf
behind the bathroom mirror,
at eye-level now.
I remember how good
cool tap water felt
after the hot tears,
tilting my head all
the way back & willing
my eyelid to open,
& afterwards feeling
the scar & the scare recede
from that bit of grit,
but also a lingering sense
of guilt for letting
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: