I know a grave in the woods
tricked with running cedar, mulched
with hickory and storms, telling heaven
to dance cobble-rock and quail-feather,
tuning up the sprouts, and all the thaws,
so they smooth and wriggle, and they smooth
and bank up every skeleton against a ghost,
so they all sing, so they all remember names
that touch like the tallest willow’s shadow
cribbing across the face of an old woman
waiting to find me here at home and alive.
We trace the rarest hummingbird
in our fossilized eyes. It’s the blurring field
slimmed from its wings. It’s the blue throat
captioning our brains, saying color, wow,
color, fire, no words, shake a million nerves
then scratch out every voice. It colors you
with no other world. It holds you. It moves.
Last night the sky was a child
coughing into a blanket, drawing
itself from a pale aurora jabbed
with another storm on the sun,
as if it’s got a circle of old friends
jumping tombstones. There might
have been a tribe of younger stars
dropping empty green rose-stems
through our curtains. Except last
night the child slipped its ghost
and stretched the sunrise against
the river trees.
Matthew Bruce Harrison’s writing can be found in West Branch, Yemassee, Carolina Quarterly, Texas Review, Adroit Journal, Cincinnati Review, Bayou, Gargoyle and Permafrost, among others. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart and for the Best of the Net Anthology, and his fiction has been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award and was […]
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