English Poems

It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.

As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,

or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he
had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass,
and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon.

It was not that the calendar hadn’ t numbered the days
with an orbital accuracy, its calculations
exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock

A pedal-pusher said to me
No braykaiser
No sterfput
A-stepping and a-stoumping cretin-wise
Could drive a man to madness
Just as no thousand Orphas all draped in damp peignoirs
Doing their great kochera
With the prima donna
Of Iquzegdamoda

It sweats into the tongue and groove
of redwood decks with a Tahoe view.
It slides under the truck where some knuckles

are getting banged up on a stuck nut.
It whirls in the egg whites. Among blacks
and whites spread evenly. Inside the chicken

factory, the Falcon 7x, and under the bridge.

There’ s death by taxi, by blood clot, by slippery rug.
Death by oops and flood, by drone and gun.

Death with honor derides death without.
Realpolitik and offshore accounts
are erased like a thumb drive lost in a fire.

The night you died, I dreamed you came to camp
to hear confession from an Eagle Scout
tortured by forty years of sin and doubt.
You whispered vespers by a hissing lamp.

Handlers, allowing you to hike with me,
followed us to the Bad Axe waterfront
down a firebreak this camper used to hunt.
Through all I said you suffered silently.

I blamed the authors of my unbelief:
St. Paul, who would have deemed my love obscene,
the Jesuit who raped me as a teen,
the altar boy when I was six, the grief

I

The most devout long to breathe the dirt's scent once more.

The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.

Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.

Wine is not drunk enough.

Be bitter but only about the Truth.

With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.

The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.

You will never know the river wets your hair.

What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?

Work is wings.

II

Without intending to hide,
the imagined copperhead
hid on the path ahead,
unseen on bronze leaves, unheard,
and a mortal likelihood
at every step. This was childhood,
mine, the wood’ s jihad
against a boy who’ d
intruded among monkshood,
wasp, tick, and nettles haired
with needles. Scrub brush abhorred
him with a horde
of  welts, bites, and stings, but he’ d
never seen a copperhead,
though he’ d looked hard

1981,
&  for three days in Nebraska
penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation
all over again in one-light towns.
Three days in Nebraska,
&  a hundred calves come out bloody & new
as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum

Geof Huth

More About Visual Poetry >>

Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing
in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow-
brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean-

dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit
trees — bare-boughed and newly blossoming — skinnily
shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my

“now” [in this pictured perfect] four-
year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie
low. I remember hiding in the fort