LOCAL IDIOM
Zigzag through
nameless woods,
I scan my skies
for chimney smoke.
Like beavers that
trouble our pond,
I'm comfortable
closer to home.
I gnaw only edges
of worlds.
When I spit them
out, they caulk my lodge
and drip from its
cloud-stained dome.
Threadbare firs
encircle me
like a nave of
blue whale ribs
while wolves chew the full mead moon
down to opalescent bone.
But I was catching other dreams
at our camp by the cold crater's rim,
the night we skipped star-stones.
A fool for you, I tossed the crumpled
wings of this poem into our fire,
then kicked at its
coals
with my bare, burning
feet
till embers hissed,
flared, and sputtered out.
In the land of missed opportunity and stumps
where silence
chants its lacquered prayer
and half the language
gongs,
I ate our howling
ashes – bitter in my belly,
yet sweet as
stolen honey
ladled from the
Great Bear's tongue.
THE GIFT
Searching
for the lost coin,
now
stubborn in its hiding,
I sweep the hardwood floor,
scour the cedar deck,
rifle drawers, claw through chests,
rake the garden's tangled depths,
mole-roads, rose roots, blackberry crypts,
corner it at last
– belly-up but breathing –
behind an empty apple box
forgotten in the dream-infested
mushroom cellar, pulsing like
a toad
resigned to spit and brood
below the creaking timbers of
the house.
Tiny
as a redwood seed
and
rough as pumice stone, it cries
with
the thin voice of a penny
when
I bend to pick it up,
as if by pleading in the dark
sown deep around us
it could deflect one thorn or
thought,
reverse one whirling atom,
as if by sinking into shadow
it could become the nothing
it is not.
NOWHERE
Ship horns ooze slow sound
today,
cruel, malevolent, oily.
Smears of grey, wolfish light
erase cliffs, and I can't
recall
where the corniche curves
or the walk runs laser-straight.
Cedars anchoring soil to
stars disappear.
Wet blades adhere to bare
flesh and feet.
All night the fog pressed
down
its chloroformed rag.
A trawler faded, a tanker
burned,
each greasing the edge of saber-sharp
reefs.
Morning finds me facing blank
screens,
as lost as I was in unmuzzled
sun
before clouds inched east
over old-growth spruce, and the
mute tide
swaddled our roughshod beach.
Paul Fisher's first book, Rumors
of Shore , won the 2009 Blue Light
Book Award, and is forthcoming in 2010.
Recent poems appear in Cave Wall, Centrifugal Eye, DMQ Review,
Pedestal, Umbrella, Waccamaw, and
various other publications. Paul is the recipient of an Individual Artist's
Fellowship in Poetry from the Oregon Arts Commission, and a graduate of the MFA
program at New England College. He lives in Bellingham, WA, with his wife, two
cats and a dog.
