Black strings
Up in the mountains
they dug a hole in the rock
they filled it with a tube
The machine they made made black holes
It was fired on a Wednesday.
It was fired, I think
One of them rolled the hole
into a tube
his eye looked through.
Today I saw a sparrowhawk
crunching the gravel of the garage roof
her feet clenched the world
beneath her
pinching the sky to
a needle’s pointed eye
the flat
sheet
of sky
wrapped round her
denting with her wings beats.
Her eye was yellow
Her chest strung with black stripes.
She let me watch her awhile
and vanished.
Black strings reveal
the naked singularity
of all things.
January 2012
Troll
Speechless there was a shape hunching
dripping in the arch
what are you I said it replied I am only
visiting
grinned and shadowed
shoulders shivered in the bones
Confined I saw a buzzard over fir trees
and a heron came and landed in a
high up branch that swayed with his weight
I saw his eye
his grey belly
and the burbled stream beneath the stone
Crossing the bridge into a few more hours
I pulled myself about my neck
shoulders scrunched around the spot where
it watched me as I went
cold head and keen gaze
following fish from above.
Jura, Winter 2008
