'The mind is the plot, it goes' and 'Like a stone that slows'
The mind is the plot, it goes
where it goes. My house, it's loneliness, page
after page the moon dies in the sun, the sun
scatters the stars.
Sometimes I think I'm in the mail. And
burn them.
A crow takes off
above our heads and sinks
into the scattered
thoughts of a wandering cloud.
It's in your eyes, the way you walk, your
swiftness.
Like a stone that slows
as it sinks to the bottom of a well.
Like a person who saw paradise from the outside
and never found a way back home.
To the street below. To the speck of blood
in your clear eye.
Dream it, and tell it,
in slippers one covers the same ground.
Like fire, for the burning,
until everyone cries out in unison.
The piano is hard, like the sound of the wind.
You pant like a fish hook,
like a china
cup, like a high-ceilinged studio room
with its north-facing
windows.
Ralph Angel’s latest collection, Your Moon, was awarded the Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also has published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
