Most read ▸
Andrew Hamlin
One lost DVD
stains all my gratitude
at the sun’s return.
“High above it all”
depends very much, of course,
upon your staircase.
I’ve never pondered
all those other mini-mart hands
depleting Pop-Tarts.
Waving flies aside
across Green Lake Way from Spud,
blighted wood bleachers.
Campus Parkway,
the grey crane casts no shadow
swinging, silent, south.
Heart-shaped slice of pear
Friend, there are certain sounds I love at night,
like the ongoing opera of the crickets,
the one-note sonata of an owl in a nearby tree,
or, should I be lying by the lake, the furious
but curiously calming encroachment and retreat
of the waves, or even the primal, contagious howls
of a thousand wild adolescents at Nelson Ledges,
shouting all night like lemurs,
their brains too stuffed with serotonin to sleep.
But the noises your lover makes with you
would not be welcome to my ears
were it noon in the middle of summer, let alone midnight,
then one-ten, two-thirty, three-fifteen and four.
It’s impossible to sleep when her piercing moans
nearly perforate my eardrum, so please let me know
trees and lines and stickmen
and boulders too big to be less than
a hill heavy rock a motel {sigh}
a main street see the middle
school from here and a parts store nearly
the library and a grocery store below
in the midway
and a park with boulders taller
than 5 men where quail live
and deer play but no dogs are
allowed and they have swings
and a merry-go-round and it’s
almost summer the thrift
store will have summer clothes this
week and this is where the turkeys
go and they have teeter-totters
I could use a million different things to describe you
I could use all the cliches
but they won't do you justice
your blue eyes don't look like the ocean
rather like the colour of the certain lake from a childhood memory
your brown hair isn't like sweet chocolate
it is the exact colour that makes my heart well up to big in my chest
you're so much more than descriptions
or any poems could relate to
there is something about you that isn't like the other people in literature
your eyes are a different blue
your hair is a different brown
your laugh is a different sound
nobody will ever understand the magic that you propell
for simple words could never be you
under falling water
lies a bird
with a broken wing.
near a lake
that is blue
from a sky
that is blue.
on a green bed
it flops
& seeks the source
of the rain;
into the rain
it flops
seeking the source.
other birds
pay no attention
walk on water skate on ice. what color ice? my skates are alfred johnson skates. PAT. AUG. 27. 1918 NO 1277137 CHICAGO USA NOT CONNECTED WITH NESTOR JOHNSON MFG CO. does ice mirror? it is day ice is silver metallic blue color of mirror of skates. lake's face we glide over used to mirror sky. did the lake look forward to freezing point? to when the liquid surface crusts? innocent enough it starts. water cooled turns heavy sinks warmer water surfaces. continuous cooling. watch the sun skid on ice. i am joking he never does detests slippery surface. it starts with a shiver continuous cooling goose pimples. for a second a certain expectant dullness of the surface then a thin skin forms like on milk cooling continuously. ice is less dense so floats its power lies in expansion. do you think skating a substitute for flying? empires of ice expand below. domain of the beautiful but terrible ice queen. palace walls of drifted ice windows of bitter wind a hundred halls ablaze by northern lights. gemini fly a lot in dreams as long as they are light. air is their element. at night ice is black even from above i guess i should know. we love to skate at night on a surface well lit.
Wholly absorbed
into my own conduits to
an inner nature or subterranean lake
the depths or bounds of which I more and more
explore and know more
of, in that sense that other than that all else
closes out and I tend further to fall into
the Beloved Lake and I am blinder from
spending time as insistently in and on
this personal preserve from which
what I do do emerges more well-known than
other ways and other outside places which
don't give as much and distract me from
keeping my attentions as clear
Evenly
fog parts and
you are again lovely
as a fresh
hill lady is.
High mountains
we hear you
over our lake fireworks.
How welcome!
Roadlake rushes to pour
its pools onto the pathways.
Mercury-mirrors dot them
imaging the trees' dark sway.
Spring, and spring of her life also. She walks
to water to stand behind sedges, thinking of snakes.
And snakes come. First one, lazily, tail
sculling, head high, counterclockwise along
shore, and then another. And then -- another.
All going, she notes, the same way round. Next day,
incorrigible child, she rigs a black fly rod
with stout green line tied, butt end and tip end:
a snare. Back to the sun-long lake. The snakes
continue their rounds. She casts loop, she waits.
One comes, riding high in clear water, black eye
bright. Caught, the looping, livid thing
bends the rod double almost. On close inspection
she speaks its given name: common water snake.
Proudly she touches the twisting ribbon of flesh,
Under stars
diamond hard,
I cross this log bridge
where we fed birds
by the lake,
skating my boots
like a young girl,
hoping to find you,
this time, cabined,
building fire
on the open hearth.
Remember climbing to
the lakes basin?
How, rounding
that last bend, we
were hammered down
by the glory of
summer snow —
Even the gray jays
alighting on our knees
to seek crumbs
could not long bend
our eyes away.