More on: poetry

In the dark I inflate balloons ———————————for my children it’s nighttime in the house ——————————-I lose my breath, they grow their aerial games, ———————-the threads on which they become acrobats their water shins luminescent hair ———————-their laughter issues forth or holds off, paper decorations on the walls, and the colors, loose folds on their wrists,…

Love at its start and at its finish is not a sentiment ————–but in your arrival a restless fury, eye of cyclones, the dream of a fossilized gaze smashed under amber arrangement of stars in the air and on your face— each step a last judgment. Sentiments change, but not the struggle between the life…

Yes, a nameless quietness fills the frontiers within which my disgrace cries out. Maybe that’s why I tell my name to it when I wish no more we were together or when I tire of bearing myself. With my own hands maybe I’ll gather what’s left of the shiver of the aspen tree every evening.…

Through the gates of eternity I’ll ride On a grasshopper huge and green. ————————–—Egils Plaudis don’t beckon yet! I don’t yet want to ride to you on the back of a huge grasshopper I still want to linger here among various earthly substances still want to see how the wind sweeps away slogan after slogan…

1 the droning dies down, the sea steps back, leaving salt on stone foreheads, on the years’ shells and that which we so stubbornly call poetry. come, sit here, on this wind and wave crumbled shore and let’s be silent for so long, till night lowers eyelids on the open sea and no one remembers…

My words verge on silence like great birds that disappear into the early evening: their strenuous white wings carry off the intense sweetness of dusk, visible then in starlight. My words turn toward the night with no look back at what is lost or won, or what is missing, like those workers, who, utterly fatigued…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

Matter, mother, Maria Names that come from the beginning With tractor or dragged plow or pick, shovel, spade, hoe, black, reddish, parched, mud-caked, the earth is hard to break. Men labor over it as over a woman virgin even after giving birth, laboring as on a sea whose waves close above him—foam, blossom—as men work…

Poxes of the sun or of the mind bring the force-ten firestorms. After come same-surname funerals, junked theory, praise of mateship. Love the gum forest, camp out in it but death hosts your living in it, brother. You need buried space and cellars have a convict fetor: only pubs kept them. Houses shook them off…

i.m. Matt Laffan 1970–2009 Four villages in Ireland knew never to mingle their blood but such lore gets lost in the emigrations. Matt Laffan’s parents learned it in their marriage of genes they would not share again. They raised him up through captaincies and law degrees. He exalted them with his verve and clarities, sat…