Poems 33

Of everything for everyone. That day, That thread of gold, our hands linked loosely are A keepsake for the time when things don’t play Together. There was then a door ajar To Eden or Cathay.

WILLIAM LOGAN

The salmon All the threats of fall have deranged The simple pastures of light. A thread Of birds alights in the stony wash.

The eye submits to their brevity. Without the sledded occupations of the day Dragging the body horizon to horizon,

Nothing wrenches muscles from their scale. The salmon’s heart, a slight geometry in the palm, Opens when the belly spills

Orange roe into the stainless sink The fisherman scrapes The runny liver out. Through slimy shallows

The thudding fish roll until highlights Scare them into wariness and frenzy. Piercing a lattice of blind, the morning fractures

Into partial music, a staff of bamboo. In the cold air, birds switchback over The orchard, their passage

Interfering with an inobservant music. The uselessness settles like radioactive dust. My hand fits the slack clamp of gdls.

I am death. I carry death.

34 Critical Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 2

Tropics Not every night begins or ends discretely In the fireworks of the sun; some sinuate Into an undisturbed land where royalty

Has not held sway. What meets fear on an unlit road But a species of the larger fear that presses The horizon no longer there or there,

But here, closer to the self? The woods untower To fields, and the first glow in the distance, Like heat lightning, channels the air

With an electric calm. Close to the forest, Fireflies have been borne into the dry season, Burning their sequences across the weeds.

None of this is quite real, and under the thinning Blackness, the grasses receive a metallic glint, Their movements painted and false. Along the beach,

Dry nets grasp the black wood of the boats. This unsuitable land infects the self That would prefer the pregnant, unnatural dark.