1. Adam

A lamp passed behind a perforated shield;
stars leaked. What he thought thunder brought
footfalls of lightning. He scanned over the
plateau & nowhere found a neighbours spoor.


2. Oblation

The Island nations of the colder latitudes
breed alluvial poets, it is believed, who convene
once yearly under friendly, arched viaducts
to talk of river shingle, boulder, and water birds.


3. Detail

The yellow machinery tracks on the freeway
are as soldiers in single file stretching out into the
late afternoon, slanting sun, shadow-crimson
earth leaning forward to the compassed horizon.


4. Born

The year of my birth followed by a hyphen,
by the solace of expectation, by a small measure
of success, by a teasing out of hopelessness
and of course, by another date yet to be fixed.


5. Style

Would he have leaped from the stern of the
Orizaba, at noon on April 27, 1932 if hed known
of the unfashionable rise in sea-levels 70 years
hence; Hart Crane, a rhetorical gesture, surely?


6. Beachcomber

Pampiniform it writhes, bladder-wrack or
kelp, a heavy swell that slops about rustily in
the basalt trough, breaking through the sea rush;
& solitary goes Heaney, curling at dictions.