Stephen Vincent

 

From Trellis


Backwater blues move      me
Love with a married woman, once
Please do not holler
There is        too much now blown under
I am happily married
Quit love?       never
Well, things do happen. Mountains sometimes fall
One gets blue       An empty wheelbarrow falls
Who wakes up this morning
Azure      skies go radiant pink
Tulips shoulder back up:
Pink, orange     lavender, slender pistils.

*

I know
A man
So
Dear over
Here

What's
Matter
Informs
This
That:

Singular
Is history

Plural
Divines the
Woman
At corner's
Edge

Is one
Way to
Propose hope
A foot

Lifted
To cross
The street's
Conviction.

*

In the far north
   A mute tribe
Does lie underground
   Charmed

Blood red Madrone
   Echoes hatred
Once divest
   Settler's lust

Who can sing that song
    Rifle to chest, throat?
The squalid on horses
    Rape, fire and theft

What makes
   A dead bone sing?
Justice quarantined
   Beauty dead, wronged.

*

What was now suddenly yesterday

Luminescence not a chore
Kate Smith over the
Cave's choral, backlit, nightly mountain

Afternoon early television
Age un-battens grandmother, childhood
Drawn curtains against the sunset

Poetry's launch seals
Immortality into small stanzas
Between walls shaken syllables

Calibrate the swell of blue dissonance
No matter what one bears
An assured resemblance perpetual

What is in the breath sharpens
Opens by slim degrees
What lies dormant

This night in which
Dreams mock the limits of the living
Once amber, now gold.

*

Too tight
Abscond
She said
He will not
Cry

Or
One climbs
One flies
One ups

Such
News
So clear
Fear

Factors
Always
So true
Breathe deeper, she said
To submit
A beautiful

Thing
Wants
To

Be well known
Traveled.




 


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