Category: Poetry

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

– Ezra Pound

Don’t, they say, don’t,
like all things behind glass.

“The here is her,” he said, over and over

without turning round. Wait he kept
thinking, and he waited in that waiting
and knew every time we speak we stun
the word, so he hummed, but the humming

grew, each bee’d syllable toward
a name, and as he turned
almost surprised to read its sign—Eurydice
Eurydice—now the radio of his voice

dismantling sound.

– from Eurydice & Orpheus by Mark Iwin

sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I drag my sleeping bag
into the meadow’s precise center
& crawl inside, head first. Fräulein, there is the stars’
ceaseless drilling. I close my eyes. Somewhere below me
a star-nosed mole cuts its webbed hand
on a shard of glass. I close my ears
& over my body the current of a young doe
eddies, ripples across the field, a low-lying midnight fog
swirling after her, falling back, suspended. I know you are close.
The scar on my cheek burns. I think of reentering
your atmosphere,
your long, burning hair

Don’t move. The slightest motion

& this landscape, erased by floodlights

– Christian Hawkey