🏝️ ISLAND

by Robert van Vliet

1 · Waiting

The autumn disappointed you
like an expensive meal.
The tip of winter
broke off in the wound.
Happenings bloomed
like blood in a washbasin.

Darkness at your back. The sunrise
like a pillar, so tall it can’t fit
through your window. One
thing after another. January
like a club against the door.

2 · Providence

The stars tonight are headlights in empty windows.
Crickets drag their voices through the late
humidity. He is a cul-de-sac
of passions. He could be anything, so he
is nothing. A patrol where others were pioneers.

He seeks providence where providence
would hide—in scattered leaves, in tossed coins.
And at last he grasps the meaning of
“to fall.” Reach a star, they say. But it
will fall, he says. And they say: no man is
an island. But no: We are an archipelago,
a heap of stones stacked, submerged in water.

3. Frog

A pendulum in your head and a heart 
that feeds off the moss on the toppled 
trees. Waking up and your eyes 
are green. Far-flung wishes 
for the morning, for the wind 
that kicks you in the eye. 
Cough your emptied lungs to peace.
You cannot speak. So, cough. The wind 
will kick you and tug the clouds.

(Editor's Note: This section first appeared, with slightly different punctuation, in Otoliths.)

4 · Fields

The woman who protects herself from health
with the idea of health turns through her day
as someone raking through a drawer full
of cheap jewelry. She leaves herself sitting
on the couch in a darkened room.
She shakes the dust of her home from
her feet and, bareheaded, walks

into the fields. The fields are burning, as
they burn each spring. She stands, her eyes hollow
and reverberating with the shock
of horizon. Standing in last fall’s furrows,
she does not open her palms to heaven or turn
her eyes to the earth. The woman whose spirit is thin
from neglect and wear walks on the fields.

These fields are empty; even the trees do not
know what they are. She kicks at the clods of earth.
She does not look at the city which, like her notion
of forgiveness, modulates just short of vanishing.
There are no clouds in the sky. There is no sky
in the air, only sunlight. She will not
remember she was here when she is gone.

5 · Into the Sea

A grey boneturning day.
You lean, chilled, into the clenched
wind over the pavement.
Ten inches from the nearest
star and you only languish
and burrow into peatclods.
If you slip, forgetful,
forgotten, into the sea, leaving
your umbrella and shopping bag
on the shore, the dolphins
may nudge you and regard your
waterlogged reticence with regret.
And you will sink, a pale
sunset, a mortal bruise.

6 · Cuneiform

If we could stand still
in our immobility and ignore
the craves and clutches
of the shifting sandbars,

we too might note the unmoving
mover underneath,
the ugly uncreated good (or
pretty good) that pushes,
that plays with life like sand
or pennywhistles. A lark
skywriting in improvised cuneiform.

Would we crawl anywhere, burn our voice,
to hear theirs for even a moment?