excerpts from A Pictorial History of Wilderness
A voice lifts the music, a whisper shaped like a person in this
room and he’s talking to me
Do not anchor — this list of what you made while you waited
All you dreamed from the seasonal arrival of a Sears catalog.
Light is opening the fronds, see
the ticket counter where you speak
your destination and realize you might say any place
If I sleep here, isn’t this a story. The voice of someone whose
voice is glimmering, trumpet, vine
Child of the west, if as I, you speak a milky crane
Seen under water the bathing place for stone
Rare herons spotted here but do we make the trip I hunted
the dictionary of all mammals.
We ate mackerel out of a can, mashed together in patties and fried,
large as a child’s palm
Did we come from the place I loved for its low dousing of clouds
Night herons quickly lift as felled trees
Seven days and all the doves on our windowsills quiver
They have come in color, tricked by winter’s shadow
Today snow fell and fell again to thicken
This dawn sleeping by a mother’s breast it is not mine
Pieces of land lay beside each other, we look for edges that fit easily
The body not machine, some ground to till or pick rocks out of
The world’s tallest building within the shape of a hand when it is
no longer yours
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SELECTED FOR
Best New Poems Online
July 2, 2011