Blood Orbits. Ger Killeen

Letters From The Front, 1906 – 2006

       Jocasta

       Tree Alphabet

       Gallia

       Shannon Mercury

       Sea of Cortez

       A Shelter in Copan

       Ulisse

       Paula/Paul/Frank/Frances

       Influenza

       Surety, Part A

       Thoughts From A Garden

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Free Verse Editions

      Calendar

      Now it is one era; now,

      another. The sky

      burns purple, unpronounceable;

      the hours are a bristling

      looped into your nerves.

      And so, the rock-doves plunge and swoop;

      sight strains to parse

      their scattering into

      verbs inflected for the future;

      a hand like amber smoke casts

      yarrow sticks, bundles them

      promisingly; so many silvery cities

      trilling in the solar winds.

      Soon the oceanic clatter

      of a talus slide;

      soon the fluent stutter of guns.

      The Abyss of the Birds

      The hours flashed, flicked

      their crests; I broke

      through the scenery

      to the eternal half-

      smile of hooks:

      I was a man

      like a tree, walking.

      Sparrows came in gusts,

      cranes came, and hawks.

      I held their cries; there was

      a sound of leaves; I held them,

      gave them back as smoke.

      To the Counterglow

      To the counterglow, to

      the lesser darkness

      barely shading

      out from the greater,

      follow the famine-

      script limping across

      the complicit plane

      again and again. Against

      a noctuary’s

      petering out in ashes

      set one human carpal

      sailing backwards

      with a few willow baskets,

      a few amphorae

      for the next trial,

      your’s or another’s.

      The Translator’s Dream

      There are poppyseed cakes

      cooling on the window sills,

      there are horses swimming

      in the rich grass beyond.

      Towards evening, the sky

      grows more primrose,

      the mammulus clouds

      yellow as a girl’s hair:

      indoors, the new light bleaches

      all his spread-out papers blank.

      And a rain that begins

      as dashes turns into periods:

      “Es heißt ‘virga’ “, a stork

      clacks from the loft.

      Soon he can hear the roof

      whine under the grainy weight,

      see the land as far as the eye

      can see take on a black gleam.

      The postman knocks twice,

      slides under the door a postcard

      of Goethe’s spreading oak:

      “I waited and waited.

      Why did you not come?”

      in a hand he doesn’t know,

      and no return address.

      Finisterre

      Only the doggerel

      of forgetting, bitten-off palatals

      of Gaulish spat

      out of baffled faces, crab-

      crackle of carpals: it is

      late; a whirring psalm salts itself

      in between the embroiderd edges

      of every scar combed across

      the tableaux of unicorns and roses

      massed on the endless

      leveled lands behind. The sea

      widens its blind eye. All

      I want to know is

      who sees this,

      what has been hoped

      asunder by wave after wave

      of men in invisible ships?

      Blood Orbits

       (To Simone Weil)

      Prayermower, periodic

      comet.

      Of the perennial verbs

      nothing left

      but the stalks. You keep one

      step ahead, out-

      traveling the snowline,

      the