The hunter turns the gun upon himself
A rabbit puts itself in danger’s path
Overhead a hawk displays itself
The summer is a tide of death
the sick child is docile like a dog
the lover slowly stretches like a cat
ready to play hide and seek
ready to bring death inside her limbs
Listen to the summer’s empty song
It has no colour and no sentiment
All its creatures are indifferent
Every rain drop every bird call sings
along
The head cannot recount a single thing
Other than a fleeting sense of having
lived
You ask for nightingales and swans
Here is a sparrow for your rhyme
You want a lily or a rose
Here is nettle, yarrow, queen anne’s
lace
*
Sweet dryad sweat
The oily pine
The sticky juniper
The creak of noon
*
The clown dressed as an Admiral
Sees the fleet off in fine style
No one notices the tear
In the cardboard hat he wears
*
The figure of the poet
Martyr, maven, simpleton
Regarding shadows on the wall
Cast by flames upon his hair
*
When the angel of the stream
Glints and glitters at the day
We lie silent in a dream
Nothing of our world remains
*
Up the dead pine
Two swallows fuck
Aflicker
Chattering
*
I write neither
History nor truth
Both unassailable
and plain—
Like youth,
contemptible
actions of some
other imbecile
that was once me—
nothing holds course
accept
the one small
insignificant fact
of death
dropped like a leaf
on any passing day
Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He lives and teaches in Boise, Idaho. His 13th book, Golden Satellite Debris, has just been released by Shearsman Books (UK).