Andrew Grace


“I have lost the plot of the story you are telling”

I have lost the plot of the story you are telling; the flat
clear nouns you release into the air dissipate like fleet
herds between us. You say something about using the
sleight-of-eye an onion makes for sadness to your
advantage. Then a young storm, gone too quickly to
believe in. Rain-cooled brimstone seeps up as today’s
dusk. Like me, the last light feints focus. Thus we are liars.


“This is the Chapter in which everything changes”

This is the Chapter in which everything changes. You
are gone. A cab’s double script unspools down the dirt.
I remember driving you somewhere. Snow purged an
obscure thirst of a parched, white sky. We talked about
the life after our deaths. Unwashed in an abandoned land.
Houses on fire, or else, the escort of fire. A march
forthcoming. We would walk upright, salt wandering to
salt. Late and far.


“Dead farmers praise millennia dust”

Dead farmers praise millennia dust and the white blood of
weeds. Someone’s dead daughter praises in great sheets
across the flimsy shields of ginko. The dead lovers press
black hands all over our faces, but come up short of
praise. We are unredemptive to them, as are their pasts.
The dead pilgrims, lost in blue pines, have stopped praising
and forgotten how. They step from us and are not missed.

-all three poems taken from his manuscript Sancta


Wild Dogs

I used to wake early and watch the sheep lift their
heads in fear. Once, a wild dog took shape out of the
wood-frost, slicking its blue tongue, its coat itself a
polluted ice, then hard lunge, gloss of rent muscle, red
rash inwound on the boneyard, no sound, everything
disfigured in mist, everything with its skeleton mask on.
I thought the sheep were meant for hunger, the way
our hunger is meant to become its own guide to call to.
This mist, here, years after, devolves into a mouthful of
wool. I used to want to witness loss, to have my shoeprint
in the sheep’s blood be a seal to mark the act as closed.
But it is not necessary. The proof is obliterated by darkening
shifts of grass. I used to wake early and watch a blurred
face that came to be mine flare up in the mirror. Now, in the
fallen night, I can see what is not meant for hunger—throb
of stars, your cool, unwashed skin: trademarks of what rises.


Divisible

Concussions of light.
River, bridge, abandoned mattress.
As if out of need, it is late in the year.
Wolves’ bivouac for flense and birth.
Tremble of backwater imperceptible, as when a fever returns.
Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly.
Poverty of linden.
All of my errors have been of omission.
I cannot bring a world quite round
Blacksnake armada.
Or is it moccasin.
I cannot bring a word down for the room I left behind.
Poverty of mission.
And other maimed unities.
The room a group of voices has left.
Asphyxiations of wind.
Crawfish odyssey.
A group of voices: myself, brother, mother and
Omissions, stopped waves.
We will meet at the river.
A wolf placenta stains the abandoned mattress.
Our hour will never come.

-all poems previously published in Harp & Altar