Sample Poems by David Swerdlow
Mission
Red-veined leaves like ideas,
maple and ash,
and this one, bent, as if bowing,
~
suspended in death
by the spider web, the spider
dead at the center,
curling into itself,
the mind’s
~
eight legs retract. It takes centuries,
~
one imagines, snow,
~
multitudes. Now,
two men, Jews, hold open
their arms to the light
shot through the trees, October
~
upon them, travelers
~
into the wilderness, five books
to sing
before the world awakens
~
again, as if
their duty were finally
clear, death hung
among ideas, song
~
of the abdomen, silk
of the centuries—
The Lake
Right-angled light, cold window,
small and terrible
~
decisions left on the pier—
~
Muted white pines
crowd the water like men
~
who believe
in a mysterious God.
Over the water
~
small waves blossom
over the dead.
Cricket Song for Water
Stowaway against cold, when your habitual song rises to be heard,
when the middle-aged man and the younger woman walk about,
when everyone at home undoes everyone else’s desire,
when the whole night’s emptiness spills its reliable song
and wasps sleep in the doorframes over our lives,
I sing with you as the cold water drips from the roof
and pools in the grass for the white and yellow butterflies
to visit all afternoon, winging their silences
so mournfully pleasant as we die
and become these small holes in the universe.
Buy a chimney cap, I think, then
you will sleep, but you will miss
variations the bird (if it is
the same bird) has picked up
from its time on earth, from everything
it hears. O, I should say, round eye
of fidget
then focus, take incidental
music into your feathered vault, include
the way I clip limbs
from the weeping crabapple—metallic slice of long blades,
bumping thud of wood grip on wood grip, take the killdeer’s
silly sad threat, and the plague of the cluster flies’
drone. Take my two daughters’ argument
over who loves me more, and my own dream’s rickety breath
and give them to me, gifts difficult
to return
in their long stone box.
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