Russell Thornton

The card you gave me, your small handwriting
on the back - is gone. But the deep black ink
of the artist's drawing pen stayed with me,
and the ancient couplets became the dark
...

They're driftwood, or worn buoys -
now as they stand up out of the water
and stare towards the shore, they're living mineral,
like people with only rudimentary eyes.
...

It had come down into the city
out of the mountains in the night
and gotten lost, had sensed the dawn,
heard car noises at the corner,
...

The late sun burning close, and slow waves coming in -
the sea's mysterious lit wine of touch
on the sand, slipping away glittering
in scattered glasslike grains for an instant,
...

All I could do while I stood there
dazed in the dim bare room
was wonder why the price of one
was five dollars more than the others.
...

Waking suddenly in the island room,
the balcony curtain blowing aside
and flaring as if ablaze in the sun,
I heard a woman singing unaccompanied,
...

I find webpages and see the faces
of two of your now forty-something siblings,
...

I
When they put tablets on each other’s tongues,
knowing it was time, and the young woman
gave a tablet to their child, saying to him
...

The horizon a burnt-out eye socket,
the sea a throng of mouths wounding themselves against sand -
the only shelter was inside the car,
so we drove down the peninsula just to drive,
...

I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
...

Here are amphoras on display, and maps of sea routes
to and from all parts of the ancient world.

You like the Greek ones best,
...

A murder of crows stands along a power-line,
and I hear nothing all morning but the cawing,
and see nothing but the shapes of blackness -
the sires who deal out death, and find and eat the dead -
...

Evening sunlight and just-cut lawn -

a lamb shorn for the first time,
and slapped back into the field
...

Fire engines, police cars, ambulances -
they go by day and night near where we live
up the lane from the corner triangle
of fire hall, police station, hospital.
...

Everywhere: Open, Open. Stores, banks. Stores, banks.
Gas stations. Open, Open Later, Open.
For as long as I can remember, I have thought about stealing.
...

To drive by his house is to look from the street
up beyond the low stone wall and the slope of lawn
to the rectangle of reddish-orange glow,
the copper door covered with the hundred indentations
...

On the anniversary of my grandmother's death,
I am given a lesson in music. I learn my heart muscle
contracts in a rhythm unbroken with her last pulse-beat;
her heart's rhythm was a continuation
...

The drop of blood
falling from the cut above a man's eye
is one drop.
That drop multiplies
...

...

Her shoulder blade. Wing bone of a wren.
Six years old, thirty-five lbs. After her
bad dream that she cannot remember,
her running to the big bed. Her falling backward
...