Mass livid w/ purple, pale yellow, bruise swelling over the
Outer Banks & the Carolinas, do Tígers swim in the deep
foaming blues off the bight? Work each day now my youth
is over & my father has wandered into a dark room where he
isn’t. “The fields are devastated, the ground mourns.” They
aren’t, it doesn’t, but sthg courses through me w/ súch strict
hunger. Dream: there is a key you know is here, buried in
papers. Once you sifted through them at yr leisure, pausing
to read, nodding in recognition. Now yr hands move in a
blaze of anxiety, casting them aside. These are my psalms to
yóu, some in hatred, some in love, some in fear. Some are
square. I don’t know why. Can yóu hear? Raise them like little
cries against “the ultimate integrity of silence.” Redbud on
Dacian the wind tugs at sullenly, mid-August, omen. I am
beginning & end, perfect solipsism, a kind of truth.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas has published three collections with Faber & Faber: Terror, Black Sun, and Floodmeadow. He has a selection in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard & Shining Things and is the Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence at Duke University.
Photo by Jason Pischke on Unsplash
