Monday, February 12, 2007

NEW! 3 poems by Daniel Johnson

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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