zafusy

Basic as mud
Hammer pocked.

Who cradles it?
My wrist
I allow to thin and

Curl to an end–
Scythe or limb
Trembling water.

Crouched in morning
Light is
A settling

Of dust and water
Metals
And teeth.

As he who keeps–
The pan
Is green–

This belly I split
A radiant fish.

Daniel Schillinger

Have remembered you me and you
Who braid in dream fibers the ordinary broom,
Breathed across the sidewalk under afternoon,
And stoop to hold the long awaited post, ruined
By every necessary step
That daily hits the Avenue;

Or the clock shattered in the square
Fallen by lovers’ private fame, then forced
Quietly under the maple flames
Of autumn and winter’s nowhere?

With evening, now, children clear the ground.
They play a game of rings and stones.
This, an old delight in change and chance,
Bemoans our place:
Not the Avenue, the waning light,
But what we share, our hands.

Daniel Schillinger

Evermore, returning in dream,
incomplete: the windshield,

passenger, snow falling
furtively in and through.

At first where
for all that is missing:

fluorescence, a mother’s embrace,
thick-red-blood pushed

by heart only.
Then the cool affirming wind,

the clarifying sighs of steel.
To unclick eyes - and belt.

Daniel Schillinger