Truck

4 Poems by Andrea Moorhead

Distances Traveled

           

Hooves along the ground and the sky liberated

the fleece wanders and we haven’t found anything else here,

trials of coal furnaces, jets of iron, the conflagration expected

in the green green and always but assaulted

at the stroke of and magic cannot dissipate this uneasiness

lean against the boundaries, incursion and infraction

but the papers are clean-clear and resolute:

no one enters without wiping first and the feet next into this cage of

respectability and shedding grace as the only impediment

and hooves along the ground lead to the sea

salt sting and careless

the rocks have left their own impressions

hard-wired to the soil sky sun.

Definitions

terrible doubts, they say, and I haven’t a clue to what that means, terrible and anfractuous, terrible and misleading, terrible and dangerously poised, that could be it, the result of too much drowning thinking recalling whether or not and terrible, they say, as if the rain bent around the lungs and the cataclysm were today not and then tomorrow clear again, blue green in the near and the distant hills always suspended entire to be dealt with whenever and then we cannot repeat this adage strange particle of desire, can we?

About the relation between

did your feet and the dictionary not withstanding

an isolation of language unpredictable and complete

your words skittering on the icy surface

it is January, you know, and the wind at the face and the ice at the eyes

and this stinging smarting along the lips prevents

comprehending words as they tumble out and subdivide

some sort of random creature, microscopic, no doubt,

and did your feet and the dictionary not withstanding

give you any clue about the relation between

and because of this tendency to avoid withstand resist

and it is snowing ever so and gently

the links are broken and we can wander all the way

without consulting the forlorn and duplicitous

transformer of what little light we see.

Bewitched

Yellow chromosomes, a spectacle you cannot tolerate

this winding twisting reformatting jungle of

and the qualities always not present

suppressed static and then again you found out something

the yellow was lighter and swifter

the red-blue invisible to your eye and hands running along

the bark of a tree could raise up yellow chromosomes

the kind physicians never remember

the kind hiding along the cortex of the mind,

the softest petals at night are blooming over by the wall

by the sunken grey stone wall

beading in the moonlight

the character of trees insolent and pure.


Andrea Moorhead was born in Buffalo, New York. Editor of Osiris and translator of contemporary Francophone poetry, Moorhead publishes in French and in English. Poetry collections include From a Grove of Aspen (University of Salzburg Press), Présence de la terre (Écrits des Forges), De loin (Éditions du Noroît) and Terres de mémoire (Éditions de l'Atlantique). Translations include The Edges of Light by Hélène Dorion (Guernica Editions), Night Watch by Abderrahmane Djelfaoui (Red Dragonfly Press), and Stone Dream by Madeleine Gagnon (Guernica Editions 2010).