Death, Perfect & Reverberation

a stillness will appear in your body

Construction

Nothing so insistent in the air— so on, so on I understand the hammer beating toneless on a wall

We were coming out of the school

We were coming out of the school and there’s this big street in front, speeding cars, no one slows down.

This Woman

I am a woman — an entity — preyed upon by jurisdiction over me

always the clock, always the corridor, always the staircase

after wong kar wai’s in the mood for love ...

Compline

Lattice After Your Advice 12

The ridge is trampled by the disasters ...

Love's Death

Ammophilia

Remnants of a Disinherited Race

George Eliot calls Silas Marner ...

excerpts from sea sight

Three poems by Martin Corless-Smith

ouvrir ouvrir the nightingale / how has it come to this? / love a severed foot...

three variations on a metaphor.

imagine looking back each moment passed as one tear marking one current through an ocean of vast possibility a whole

collision of tangled paths.

when we walk we think to walk away from it all it is then of course we come across a path



two collisions with virus at the center.

when your loved one in the passenger seat turns over after crossing the second state line

An Understatement, to Call Him Quiet

If a particle moves along a line

According to the law s = f (t) where S represents the position of particle P On a line at time t, then the velocity v

Medusa

Patterns of Disruption

The Naming

Trypophobia

Citizens of The Persistence of Memory and Other Poems

Bleeding Branches

Two prose poems seek to reimagine the setting and circumstance of bleeding vegetation in Dante and Virgil.

Hymns in Heavy Monsoons

Monsoon rains take away / the reflections / of the greens, blues and whites / from the river

Tears and Pearls

The poem, "tears and pearls", is based off of the Korean account of dragons.

Ulises

In the eighth circle of his Inferno (the Malebolge), Dante places the sinners that committed fraud in life...

How We Remember The Dead

The poem is inspired by the tale ‘Tochmarc Étaíne’, meaning ‘The Wooing of Étaín'

There are certain verses

There are certain verses – sometimes poems in whole – / Whose meaning I do not know. Yet that which I do not know

Beyond The Sun-Drenched Roadside

Beyond the sun-drenched roadside / Past snowy caps and barren lands / Lies a small stone cottage

Bulmenia - A Translation

Photographic Memory and Other Poems

The lighted window across the street, is inverted in this nocturnal puddle.

100 Summers Ago

New houses, cold and stark. / I like old wood scratches, gouges and marks / Leaded windows draughty damp and dark

If I Have The Words & Late Plays of Yeats

A woman with a small fox on the lead / Walks into La Boulangerie des Invalides / The terrace of which I am having...

3 Poems

At that time of the afternoon when things wear out, / The labyrinths of six strings were drawn by the fire.

Invocation

Sepulchral Jerusalem, lay to rest my / Empty songs and promises, the last / Light fading out on the horizon

An Object to an Orbit & Boat Going Through Inlet

I remember when / Jupiter and Saturn / saved each other / from a fiery death.

Dried Paint

Mummified like the Pharaohs of yester, / Old black, red, yellow, brown, bright green, old blue…

The Evenness of Trees

Apology is a sideways glance / against a flash of shame. / In the late night, in the early morning

A Book of Thoughts

Once I had a book of thoughts / But somewhere between my 18th year / And the present

Petrifaction

Hold and hold and / hold onto memory, leave / only space for absence

Play On Words

There are sounds we carry / Like hidden larks in our chest: / Larks that fly over underground streams.

How Quickly A Year Can Die

In transition, the night’s edge / –Sweat-soaked, barren room, light curling / Around the untouched corners like...

Three Poems

The room is sparse, five people reside there, / And they do work on their theses, slowly, / Yet the only male there...

Course Catalogue LTR 207

As Professor Stein started / her lecture, / I sat in the back, / quietly flying under / her radar.

A Donation of Cypress Trees

Into a segment of darkness, two figures slowly emerged. The evening was still new, and yellow lights promising a...

On Memory: Triptych in Conversation with Yosa Buson

light flashes through glass / moves shapes across her face / pine trees glide past my window

will you be alright without me?

it was enoch, though, who got the surprise. / squeak-squeak. urgent … someone’s heel on a toy, over and over.

The Girl in the Red Cape

The girl in the red cape is still where she was. / On the island of Miyajima, on the planks of / The first Noh theatre.

Concentric

Proust described À la recherche du temps perdu‍ / As concentric. So is any good poem, / So is life. The look you gave...

Nonverbal and Lost in Grief

Such sorrowful glances, never seen, but always sent / with longing / in seclusion / hidden, but not lost.

His Name Was Leandros

There once was a man who dreamt of being alive. Who dreamt of pain, and noise, and light.

On Poetic Subjects

In the middle of a night walk, / A bolt has retrieved the light of the streets; / And out there, in the abysmal strait

And Here Do I Marvel

that she should bid the clay and plaster sing: / the chorus, draped in gowns, by height ascending

Child Ruqayya’s Hexachord

You’re held inside this story. It repeats,‍ / child witness of the snipped-off lives, / malicious massacre at Karbala.

Beirut Raining & Jumeirah Beach

Ah—Beirut, they say, / is like a bride in a white flowing dress / running along the Corniche

The Day After a Spontaneous Trip With Friends

Still it weighs on me—this life—but thank you, what now makes me attend to it.

Softness Serves No Master

This labor began in love- / scars carved into earth flesh and / stone, its carcass laid down

Plate of Roses

My sixteenth winter achieved a plate of roses, / more precisely a rose plate, / composed of pressed petals

On Winter (Isaiah 1:18)

Tonight my soul feels desolate and isolated, roaming aimlessly / through the winter of my life.

Malum

Tell me, O Muse, of the devastation wrought on / That ruined, lost citadel—its council led by / Men of high standing

Once Upon a Carton of Amber

Mellifluous these bowered years: / honeysuckle on a young boy’s tongue / unaware that each pulse lapped

Schoolyard Memories

As children we roamed wild, / covered in soot and dust, / baking cakes with mud and / donning crowns

On The Arrival of Spring

The blaze of a hummingbird hints in sweet shade, / Among brief petals that the year has brought, / Rolling out

Consolation

The church is dark and / quiet except for a woman who / looks to be about ninety years / old, kneeling and sobbing

Three Seasons

When I first heard the story, I was Persephone, / feet in the blossoms, oblivious, / on the edge of another world.

The Middle Years

Faster, says my soul, but it is not my soul / Which says it. The soul knows; the brain / is Only an accoutrement.

Spaces Are Like Silk

Spaces are like silk, / and silk is spun / like a delicate wire.

Second Lament

o child, all the chances that you have / to cull these smooth, white days / are fouled by the winds. this is a velocity

Sailing Away

Under morning's glowering sky

Three Poems

O! King of time and fortune, / Listen, for I’m losing sanity / In seeing how, to a face sculpted

Imbolc

Cast a circle, burn the sweetgrass, and raise a cup of wine.

Endless

Empty rooms / and corridors / apart / from the furniture / unmade bed

Elegy to an Iceberg & The Barbarians

Two poetic responses to Auden and Cavafy.

Beyond the Treeless Sand-Brown Hills

Beyond the treeless sand-brown hills / —new double-story houses, driveways / holding vans and cars, a thick man

For the Queen of Kindness

I made a wreath of leaves, / each leaf a light. / A breathing forest floor. / A flicker knocking.

When Man was not but found in those who lived

When Man was not but found in those who lived

The Seagull Song

the voices of seagulls deceive mariners / they don’t signal how close soil is / but only warn the unlucky travellers

Elan Vital

I come from the race of potters. / I, their breath, an artisan of the earth. / I gather the smithereens from the soil

Let Me Show You Some Chords

Poem and translation based on work by Sagawa Chika.

Navigator

the oars / your arms / spine / the keel / your rudder / words

Lament

O! Barren land, hold me in winter, / stripped of all passions. / Let me,swollen with the vaults of summer/

Of Moss and Memory

All night / a ghost with six fingers / has been sweeping / these same polydactyl chords

How to Account for the Origin & Four Minutes, Thirty Three Seconds

Of each thought when—like an animal— / It leaps, the mind, from branch to branch. /

Passion Fruit

If you would bend . . . | Just a little. | Then I could know, | The last fig,

Mare Nostrum 2.0

It is from here that I send her all my love, | Addis to the source of the Nile | To the Bride of the Med

You go and I will stay

At first I assumed it was the motion. | The stomach lurch as I felt my way | along flickering hallways |

It Burns the Blood Like Powdered Glass

Meadowthis, and -that, until | Windswept. All this:—what is, | if it can be, expected—love,

Remembering Verena

It is the year my sister is born. / A figure teeters on stilts far / above the town.

Cotton and Visitation

My mother, our first night in New York, / pointed to a pillowcase on my hotel bed.

Strains

If we can now freeze genes, / why not write a book of snow / on a field lain fallow / and read it / to pumpkin seeds

Golem 2

Along the thin dusted line and out of the unfolding blue rolls a becoming heap.

Last Tuesday at 4AM

A blur, a haze, an asymmetrical shape. Poetry is born of things, not ideas. But the image was abstract,

The Dance of the Poems

That was the top of the walk when he said: My house is a decayed house And mist clotted about the trees in the valley

Zima

Winter empties graves, sanity held together with frayed bootlaces, and the fossil grip

Woman Made of Wood

if i were a woman made of wood, oh, how impossible it would be to stab a cavern

Anguish

The child who calls home strife begs tender clement days / Dreams first of peaceful pastures then furtive getaways

Act Five

I made a theatre out of clay. Popsicle stick princesses

Latvian Red

In the Rothko Room at The Phillips Gallery in Washington, DC they only let in eight visitors at a time...

The Red Curtain

There was a red velvet curtain hanging in your bedroom...

The Elements

So much desert in the red sunlight between me and the shadow that tries to unloose itself from the anchor of my body.