Anthony Lawrence Poems

A cold extraction
from the sacred geometry of the combs,
my tongue released
into the essence of destinations, arrivals,
and a process bellowed smoke reveals
...

This pliable, light-keeping amber stem,
fleshed with sea leather
and a hollow, reef-tapping cup
...

Where are they going? Where waterspouts lower their silver
taproots into the vanishing point of a Tasman searoad,
read the ocean's internal workings by what happens
on the surface, in ulcerous light, in the wake of a longliner:
...

It's as though the Continental Shelf
with its east-facing rifts and cliffs were visible;
as though the full-bodied waves that blow over it,
...

And now the storm is inside.

He holds himself,
in the manner of a man unsure of his body
and what it can do, under pressure.
...

For you there is more to the slow liquid dancing of my tongue
than working for sighs at the heart of your loins.

Each time I part the moist petals of the larkspur
and open the folds of the sealed spider orchid,
...

Watching Dennis Potter drink
liquid morphine from a hip flask
while being interviewed for the last time,
...

My father could whistle up a fox
with the bent lid of a jam tin.
Pursing his lips, he would blow the cries
of a wounded hare into cold Glen Innes hills,
...

Get your compass and your sharpest knife ...
- John Gorka


Wind shear over mountain grass
does not spook the feeding animal,
...

When you are seven years old,
lying in the back of a station wagon
while your parents play night tennis;
when the knowledge that you are going
...