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James Stephens
While walking through the trams and cars
I chanced to look up at the sky,
And saw that it was full of stars.
So starry-sown that you could not,
With any care, have stuck a pin
Through any single vacant spot.
And some were shining furiously,
And some were big and some were small.
But all were beautiful to see.
Blue stars and gold, a sky of grey.
The air between a velvet pall ;
I could not take my eyes away.
And there I sang this little psalm
Most awkwardly, because I was
Standing between a car and tram.
I STOOD in my window
looking at the double cherry :
A great height of white stillness.
Underneath a sky
the colour of milky grey jade.
Suddenly a crow flew between me and the tree —
Swooping, falling, in a shadow-black curve —
And blotted himself out in the blurred branches
of a leafless ash.
There he stayed for some time,
and I could only distinguish him by his
slight moving.
Then a wind caught the upper branches of the cherry,
And the long, white stems nodded up and down,
casually, to me in the window.
Nodded — but overhead the grey jade clouds
God knows how many times
I have stood frozen in the hot street
with rifles pointing at my crotch
& watched myself – small
& impossibly thin – in the oil-black
mirrors of their sunglasses.
They never take them off, not even
to enter a mosque. God knows
they are easy to hate.
But after the explosion when
I ran with the others to look, suddenly
I felt shame for all the things
I had thought. One howled, the other
bled in silence, eyes naked
to the sun. I bent down.
Above the smooth cheeks
Lost the letter I in a card game
& wake up still a little drunk.
The sky looks like the proverbial world
of hurt, scarred by contrails that fade slowly,
much too slowly.
Laundry flaps on the line, & I can make out
every word: Red. Black.
Blue. The dark wash.
But where is everybody?
This old light bulb is fresh out of ideas,
even bad ones.
This body wants to be thumbed through
like someone’s bedtime reading.
The kind with covers of broken-down leather,
dog-eared pages edged
in ineradicable gilt –
Prematurely grave –
sentences delivered with a note of finality,
syllogisms grasped & held in the mind
the way excess skin from a facelift
vanishes into a crack beside the ears –
I stretch myself over the same
mattress of bone, morning & evening.
I go on as if nothing happened,
as if I were free on my own recognizance
& this growing heaviness simply means
I need more sleep.
I’ve become adept at ignoring
the jagged piece of sky pressing down
on the back of my neck.
Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
We see
a convenient part.
The great bear
has nowhere to fall
and a moth is present at his dying.
we climbed down
to the birthplace of water
bloodroot
wild ginger
sang
roots stretched into crevasses
limestoned voices
inaudible over
the gasp & suck
a scum of flotsam in the gullet
we crouched in the sun
blood-colored flowers
whitewater curling back
& back we prayed
for a rain of calcium
another sky opened
sky face says meh
to the white noise
of our anti
bodies of work
squeezing whole lives
into a few hours before sleep
while six-legged leaves
chant half the night
sky face acquires
a round cloud mouth
the moonlight denies
ever knowing the moon
the lives we’re missing bloat like corpses
as species dwindle
sky face is just the void
with better branding
box turtle
dignified despite the mushroom
on his chin
far pasture
the slow rearrangement
of cows
watering hole
the sky’s reflection in each
deep hoof print
In the news: a last-minute Brexit deal, a Covid stimulus bill passing through Congress, and possible signs of intelligent life from Proxima Centauri. Sitting outside around midnight, I watch a deer silhouetted against the snow pick her way to the stream, hooves crunching through the icy snowpack. And the lacework of tree branches: a threadbare garment. It’s one thing to feel as if we’re all connected in some cosmic web, but it’s another matter entirely to share the bleak familiarity of our solitude with strangers, I mutter to myself. Her head goes up, ears pivoting like radio telescopes in my direction.
power outage
all the glowing lights
in the sky
At some point in my late teens, I took over from my dad as chief executioner. I think it bothered me slightly less than it bothered him, a life-long pacifist.
a V of swans
my fingers still sticky
with chicken blood
the moving domes
of umbrellas