Derek Henderson


Song

Portray the reader of a woman. Her hands are filled with pearls. Her silence is the product of her silence—her sailing through a quiet house. Transparency colors everything here: windows signed with breakage, and the door is here for anyone: its clean lines, its billowing openness, its wooden lintel. Through the window a terrible image: stepping into the marriage chamber is Cain, he dominates the solitude of the night. The night’s version: the windows distribute starlight, the room fogs up its windows, the windows point to an American scene outside, miles of newly planted rows turned against the house. The first song is the window’s song, too transparent. The song ends with someone tapping at the angles of the window’s construction and there is a broken apple on the sill, fate’s presence, branches outside ridiculous, over everything, a cover, just so. The first song is torque, a matrix, roadways in May, completely American. A glass by the bed protrudes and announces water, the exact sound of a saint’s passage through the room.    The sky outside is huge, a complete frequency of color,  there is a chair sitting by the window,  a nightgown lain over it.

Derek Henderson writes: "I’m alive and well in Salt Lake City, where I live with my fiancée and our three kids, attend the University of Utah, and generally enjoy the surrounding mountains. My poems are recently published or forthcoming in Witness, No Tell Motel, Bombay Gin, EOAGH, Interim, Drunken Boat, Zoland Poetry and Cutbank. Inconsequentia, a book length poem co-authored with Derek Pollard, is due out from BlazeVOX Books this summer. Furthermore, I am presently smitten with the following line from various of Berrigan’s Sonnets: “There is no such thing as a breakdown”.

 
 
 
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