States of Poetry Poems

The correct way to drink from a broken cup.
To welcome both dark and light into your house.
To imagine tomorrow.
To pick verbena and red clover.
On the path where nothing will grow.

The correct way to tend the frozen.
To take their sweet throats and swim down into their livers.
To disembowel without touching.
To do what is at stake.
To move from c ...

Beyond a man's face stands a skilful
         Command of changes
Beyond a woman's face stands a weep
       Over the sweet peace beauty
Borrowed emerging naked rage
      Made these times emptiness
Being at the advancing haunts came
  The hunter's stamping leaps ...

no one ha
s ever written
there is no gr
eater poem
than this one

no one ha
s ever written
there is no gr
eater poem
then this one

this poe ...

Your kind friend sent a condolence card
and in the envelope a small white feather
which, she said, seemed to come from nowhere.
Angel's wings obviously, I wrote in my reply.
And for days after everywhere I went
I found small replicas, as if some tiny
feathered thing had scattered its moulting
on urban pavements, in shops and unlikely
bathrooms, a ...

for Lee Harwood

Softly solarised and parallel
two lines echo each other, glow slightly,
in a space that is nowhere

                               #

        ...

Octopus

Quick across the twilight road,
the eight legs of the cat.

Flood

Water corrects the earth
to flatness, patching fields with sky.

Alarm

Little boat of red figures, adrift between two days.

Window

The creek slides through the rain's eyelashes.