Matthew Thorburn Poems

If we can agree "there's a music for everybody,"
as Eric Salzman says, then yours
is mine. Double reed, narrow bell, dark shine
...

and the green and yellow spill
of trees were what I found here.
The island was very, very
dry that summer and the grass
...

The amazing thing is not
that geese can get sucked
into an Airbus engine
and cause it to conk out
...

I wonder who wound up with it
in the divorce - and notice immediately
how wound looks the same
as wound, a hurt - that tacky
...

A pair of goldfinches huddle
at the feeder. Drab yellow; first
you've seen this year. They peck
...

July afternoon—
Lily's tongue
the color of her snow cone.
...

An Anglo bistro. Sweat-soaked. Six-ish.
"Absolut?" Amstel Light. Midtown and then some,
and me just back from Michigan's sore thumb.
One of the city-slick? I wish. No, nix wish—
...

The one I rode in on. That mud-colored nag.
When he blinks his black eye bigger
than my fist, his eyelid's an upside-down
pocket. And the scrape, the spark of horseshoes
...

One of Max Beckmann's flat black numbers-
just shy of midnight, shiny at the elbows,
on loan tonight to help me fit in here
...

I misread on the UP escalator
at Macy's and things go downhill
from there. Now starchy
as a white shirt, now neat as a pleat
...