Sunday Poem

from THAT STRATOSPHERIC STREAK MY GREEN FILAMENT

A.M.

Leafless season, the tallest cedars

like stags knocking antlers.

The initial ordered state creates history:

pell-mell drifts down, vibrations in air become sound.

Just left of the sternum I find my echo.

Short ride out to the fence,

long walk back, flickering like a nickelodeon.

Milkweed pods have given their lives for my childhood good.

Childhood god? TV Tarzan.

Sprayed intermittently on trunks, hunter-orange I’s

like radioactive keyholes.

Some would choose great strength for their special power,

others incredible speed or x-ray vision.

I halt and take in how loud, clumsy, unmistakable I’ve been.

Wherever I am now

becomes in retrospect my yellow sun.

Clear-cut the colour of darkroom fixer,

I never spot the deer only the deer’s afterimage.

P.M.

Proprioceptors ravelled into a Gordian knot—

the decisive clue that you may’ve woken from a long nap

like a finch flying through dry ice.

Every direct ancestor, for me to be alive,

found a way to procreate.

I’ve no workable umbrella,

take my first-ever date to the laser show.

Fixtureless horizon and Darwin seasick for months below deck,

pining for the gentle roll of his daily walk.

My psychopomp a hare set on its ear.

That’s my hand, my finger next to hers

tracing circles on the armrest’s soft pile.

Where is she now?

We touch, we touched, like loops of a lemniscate.

No love left,

but time spent together is imprinted,

a fossil with clear antecedents.

In the sketchbook a Galapagos tortoise stares out from behind its likeness.

From Probably Inevitable (2012) by Matthew Tierney