Daniel Johnson
THE REFLECTION OF ALL VISIBLE LIGHT
The faces are white.
The flowers white.
I drive around town
expecting the familiar--deer
lashed to trucks, kids
on skates, the metal scent
of winter--
but an empty stadium
floods with light, a sky full of geese
fails.
Time is white.
The yard white.
I turn in the driveway white
as the butcher’s bar of soap.
HUNGRY FOR WONDER
Smoke smeared the sky;
the sun was a hole,
but my mother wouldn’t believe
the river was burning.
Another drowned twin,
a two-headed perch: perhaps,
but water, brown and crooked
as it was, still wouldn’t burn.
Must be a mill caught fire, my mother said.
Streetlights blinked on. The bridge
backed up with rusty cars.
From Strongsville to Cuyahoga,
a steelworker crawled on his knees,
but nothing was said at supper.
The Crooked River was on fire:
Christ would return on a barge.
ANGEL HUNTING
The feathery snares I set
figure-eight in air:
their candied hooks
gaff-sharp, their cat gut taut.
Because a good wind
will muss a noose,
I bell and jewel my lines with glass--
if not to maim, to gash
or nick what thrashes hardest,
what bites free of the trap.
At dusk I rig; dawn I round,
down alleys, through graveyards,
in falconer’s gloves.
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