more poems

Deep Blue Fields

This is about nothing besides
the fish we can't see.
How they swim beneath aqua stars,

glide through deep blue fields
in the webbed, coral rooted density.
The total eclipse of fins

and eyes, a common membrane tugging.
The rocking of beached, silent
creatures. Skeletal sound

left to pulsate in resonance.
Without water, stillness.
Without movement, nothing.

Barbaria Maria



...into a small dark place:

I'm thinking of sardines again
How the world changes
How things get lost from our lexicon

Like Herring in a Barrel
Becomes
Like Sardines in a Can

They stopped using Barrels
Now
They no longer Can Sardines

In my hometown
At the local Methodist Church
Every Sunday night

We've been playing a version
of Hide and Seek called "Sardines"
for as long as they've packed Fish in a Can

This year we had to explain what a Sardine is
Why when you pile into a small darl place
In some dusty hideaway where no one goes

It is like Fish packed tightly in a Can

When the thought occurred to me
What would we call this game
Without a reference point?

Can we find something new
That recovers our loss?

I'm thinking of Sardines again
How the world changes
How things get lost from our lexicon.


obeeduid


and this poem, read this week on NPR by Garrison Keillor:

New Religion

This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven's not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

Bill Holm
from: The Chain Letter of the Soul: New & Selected Poems