Three Poems

Crop Circles

Each vast dappled horse field
Or yellow maze followed by

Doppler, bird’s-eye patchwork
Of loam & meadow-grass bent

Swayback by wind, then grenade
Bursts of yarrow, feldspar, spin-

Drift, sparse old-growth forests,
Hay ricks & oceans; hitting pay   

Dirt, mound builders, pyramids
Stacked, Aztec ballcourts, space

Needles, Christmas-light cities,
Great Wall like a stitch; crevice

Devices, stone patterns, & lines in a
Cloudbook I’ve read on your hand.

 

Serpentine

Across a cairn of rocks
That dams a slow crick’s drift
Our feet skip over cracks.
Slick slate we slip on shifts
Until slack sticks un-stack:  

Sidewise, waywardly we back-
Slide over makeshift ones,
And trash the faint stomped track—
Where each dim stone seems stunned,
Our backlit shadows fract-

Ure; shards scud by sun.
All warmth held in, the worm-
Hole bubbles.  Waters scum.
Flames double in its tongue.
Past bridge, a river comes

To rend weeds it wends among.
Scales dapple, arrow off
Beyond where dark is from.
A snakehead skims aloft
Through reedy pools we’ve swum.

 

 Crack-up

floodcrests    gaps
           glacial    wrack: fissures
          windsuck    earthfolds crest-top lookouts
              ruptures   raptures in
      tectonic plates   gulch & schisms
             rift-slope    rockslide
          each slack    drift-ride down
      the mass of   rip-rap slip-ups,
slag or tremor    shatter, north rim
           rumble  firn & flash-dome
      silt-shaped    wedge clash
            ice-crack    sandblast
                moraine    & moon-tide
       magma slowly    bubbling wide      
            each last    sediment:
         pile-drive    crush & atom
            –smash     traction of a riverfall
      quibble of     pebble &
           it’s all     erosion
    that I am    blessed by

 —William Cordeiro, Ithaca, NY

 

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