Category Archives: Poetry

Publications: Wind Intervals

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closeupwindintervals

I’m excited to announce that St Brigid Press will be publishing a beautiful letterpress edition of a selection of my poems, Wind Intervals, in late April — just in time for National Poetry Month.

The book will be hand-set in Bembo type, printed on a beautiful and rugged 1909 Golding Pearl treadle press on the other side of Afton Mountain at St Brigid’s not-entirely-top-secret headquarters, guarded by trees, a gregarious dog and stunning mountain views.

There will be a Standard Edition, hand-bound at the Press and limited to 150 numbered copies ($24), and a Special Edition, limited to 35 numbered and signed copies, printed on Revere Book mouldmade text paper and hand-bound with St Armand handmade covers ($35).

You can hear me read two of the poems from the book here on the St Brigid Press site.

The book’s publication date is April 28, 2017. We’ll gather at Black Swan for a book launch and reading. If you pre-order with St Brigid and cannot make the trek to Staunton, I’ll gladly sign copies at the launch before they are shipped.

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As you can imagine, creating a letterpress book involves considerable work, including setting each letter (and space!) by hand in metal type. On a Golding press, the type is actually suspended type-side down for printing (which somehow seems right for my poetry!) after being locked tightly into place by wooden blocks and metal quoins.

WIfirstpoemontheGolding

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I will keep you updated as work on Wind Intervals proceeds! Check out the St Brigid Press site for more information on the book, additional photos of the book creation process, and to hear two of the poems.

From the City of Gloucester, with regards to trash pickup

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From the City of Gloucester, with regards to trash pickup*

Do not put out your trash tonight. The sky glitters with ice like glass
Slivers escaping the recycler, but made of purest water. They can land on your tongue

And you shall not be harmed. Do not put out what you have already
Disposed of, tonight in that monotone cold. Everything you no longer

Wanted will be covered up and turned overnight to something
Beautiful, a unique shape that will never be seen again.

The morning temperatures will rise and you will soon forget
The shapes of wonder that gathered before your door

And even as the snow recedes your memory will stick out its tongue
And your heart coming back to you will feel like walking on broken glass.

*

*Title stolen from a reminder on WordPress to residents of Gloucester, MA not to put their trash out because of the impending snow storm. Same situation tonight in Staunton, VA as the snow begins to fall. I love Gloucester and mean no offense. The title of that WordPress post just cried out to have a poem written beneath them. / JS

Eleven Years Later [Toward Kristallnacht]

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Eleven Years Later [Toward Kristallnacht]

I.

The American West hung for seventeen minutes before finally dying.
Swaying on the rope as they tenderly felt the pulse in his neck.

1903. Tom Horn had killed his last man for the ranchers, for Pinkerton’s.
For whoever paid. Under the death hood, the calm and wretched grin.

The fourteen year old boy crumpled after the bullet punctured
his father’s clothes. Before he pulled the trigger

Horn knew it was his target’s son.
Either death would keep the rustlers down. Mantra of the west

Eleven years later the sky fell
II.

Stuck in a Cincinnati zoo, the last carrier pigeon.
1914. Last breast to breathe under feather.

29 years without a trip. Her ancestors filled the sky with sound
And shit, they’d broken tree limbs with their weight stopping for the night.

Hunters would watch the huge branches fall, then after the crash
Walk over with pellet-heavy guns and finish off what was still alive.

When the trees were cut down
There was not enough sky for them. Migratorius dropped like blue snow.

Eleven years later the dogs came across the ice and saved us
III.

Trenches across the rictus of snow, 80 below, the lolling tongue, bared teeth
Blackened hands frostbitten from searching the snow for the lost package:
.
Diphtheria antitoxin in the musher’s pack. Six hundred and seventy four miles

To Nome. Twenty men. One hundred

And fifty sled dogs strove to save the town from extinction.
1925. Their lips pulled back in the canine grin. Running for love

And because they loved to run together. Over the broken Koyukuk,
Charlie Evans took the place of two of his dogs and pulled the sled.

Their frozen bodies secured with the serum. The Athabascan mushers’
Names lost in the snow. To the sound of propellers.

Eleven years later the first Olympic torch ran one kilometer
At a time toward the night of broken glass

Nocturnes (vi)

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trees

Nocturnes (vi)

The sound of crows chased my dreams
Away this morning as effortlessly

As they drove the quiet vulture from
The black walnut tree behind the house

My family lives in. I won’t call anything mine,
Not even you. Not even the crows who spin out

And then return, black boomerangs.
They leave so they can come back.

The breeze picks up and forgets. Anything
outside, like wind chimes in the dark,

could be the voice of the vulture’s dream.
Two pine trees, like brothers who won’t talk.

Thursday, Mild Evening, from the misunderstood Chinese poet

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110

Thursday, Mild Evening, from the misunderstood Chinese poet

The Watchman’s rattle. Used to bind, to tie.
Used for the sound. The lining of the shoe,

hip bone. An example, from the above,
a register of a love which means two things,

To read or to row a boat.
A tent. A stick. An octopus.

Only two of its legs mean the number eight.
I can hear the Lover’s tears.

A mountain turns on its ribs and sniffs the air
And sees us: two boats fastened side by side.

Carina

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ScargoMYC

Carina

You will never be at anchor.
There are more graves than waves at sea.

We sail through our dead with every step
And honor the skill of dead-reckoning — figure out

where you are from where you’ve been —
Always a looking-back. Just ahead

Of the breastbone, like cartilage that catches
Flight, is the curve that carves our path.

Nocturnes (v)

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chimneymoon

Nocturnes (v)

Out in the sky, no one sleeps.
–Lorca

The door opened to the boundaries of the hand.
The lines of tigers swam across your palm.

The lover’s collarbone is a galaxy of questions,
A swerve of star-white desire the planes of history

Fly beneath, orienting themselves to darting fish
Shivering in Star River. Out past the sleepless

Boundaries, tigers take new territory.

The man who will die

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cloudscape

The man who will die

Some day oh daughter, resting next to me
You will hear the breath of the man

Who will die. One day, not today, you will see
In my eyes finally the glance of a person

Who will not live forever as I saw once
In my father’s gaze, still piercing

But unable to break a veil of loneliness miles
Away where his wife sat up suddenly

Remembering only his name and not
Those of her sons or daughters. As I heard in her

Breath of resignation one day when words
Would not come and the unsayable sentence

Dropped over her head like a hangman’s hood.
But not this breath. Though for several years

I have heard it in my own breathing
Or seen it in the eyes studying me in the depth

Behind the mirror, I will keep these from you
As long as I can. And someday, not today,

When you see them you will say nothing,
Thinking surely you did not hear what you heard

Or saw what you saw. But I will know, though
I will already have begun to forget why.

Cryptadian

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cryp4

Cryptadian

The poem grows out of the words like a weed.
It does not recognize the borders of letterforms.

Your voice is the sound of your hands finding me
In a dream. Creating my body as they go.

The poem’s tendrils wind over and around each other
Always in a clockwise motion, like time.

Each reader is a rainfall on a spring night.

The words are not gone but are forgotten.
Even the green tangle is ignored

For the flowers floating like open hands.

Each reader is an insect, on a busy mission.
Will they come away with something?

The reader stops and looks at her hands.
She rubs them together, and a word comes to mind.

Reading sheet music

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arp

Reading sheet music

The guitar arpeggios are the roofs of nearly identical houses
In a small village. The streets are covered in snow, no one

Goes in or out. But the temperature even at night has turned mild,
No smoke rises from the roofs, which are spotted with moonlight.

In the morning a dog runs through the alleys, pausing here and there
To check out something new. Snow slides off a roof in the morning sun.