After Gerard Manley Hopkins
Deep Down Things
Closeted Kit Kats and Sweet Maries. Tissue paper
in Oxford shirts. Blue silk scarf worn as a tie. Argyle.
Condensed matter. Covalent bonds. Continental drifts.
Past participles. Sir John. An Invisible Hand.
The Brown Brink Eastward
Sticks of sugar cane are on sale this week at FreshCo.
Distant Indian accents command me to suck out
juice. “Never anything so sweet.” But there’s more than one
way to get a pulse – radial, carotid, orange
lentils in the pressure cooker, thump-thump of rolling
pin shaping a chapati. I comparison-shop.
I know the price per pound of cherries will be reduced.
The Black West
Google-Earthed the discounted green Eramosa belt
to find many-a-baubled lot. Can’t zoom in but see
right there new cedar shingles, the hardened teasel, springs
beneath shale, bubbles from a nascent world, thickened lines.