Patrick Cahill
TO PERSIA AND BEYOND
An incision crosses your heart. Lenticular clouds. The Witch’s Cap. His features emerged from the philosophical delirium of the furnace. Your skirt a shade of rust, you wore a large red feather in a large black hat. Amator to amateur. You slid into third and leveled him again with your lips. Or Latin for lover. You lack all calibration, either full on or off. Their wings spread between each breath, they glide on the thermals. At Diamond and Bosworth the 52. That or 40 below in the interior, your face against a confluence of optimism and ice. Your double deceived the assassin but ended her double’s career. While you await the 52 to Persia and beyond. The hornet in the sonnet. The arsenic in the apple seed. Their feathers forming wings in the blood. The harder they come. And on the thermals they translate your knowing in their flight.
BADLANDS
Your liquid selves displacing the arid there Twenty traces in twenty towns Your lover gone you fill the space with his photograph The picture arouses an intimacy the lover had not You touch yourself and feel the heat entering your fingertips The blue of the Badlands and just as intense Your touch so what The music scattered well you needn’t peace piece Night lightning and under its violet circuitry your Badlands graph the night You whet a bone to make a knife You conjure sleep to dream a knight His slow metallic gestures glint in the light Les mauvaises terres à traverser mako sica a convalescence from butte to butte Cheat medicine Striations of its buried life The Badlands you’ve just begun to cross
Patrick Cahill received a doctorate at UC Santa Cruz and wrote Whitman’s Photographic Eye: Vision in Walt Whitman’s America. His writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Daguerreian Annual, you say. say (Uphook Press), CLWN WR, Homestead Review, and The Medulla Review, among others. He has received Phelan and Central Coast Writers awards in poetry and coedits Ambush Review, a San Francisco based literary and arts magazine. He also volunteers as a Rec and Park Natural Areas gardener.
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TO PERSIA AND BEYOND
An incision crosses your heart. Lenticular clouds. The Witch’s Cap. His features emerged from the philosophical delirium of the furnace. Your skirt a shade of rust, you wore a large red feather in a large black hat. Amator to amateur. You slid into third and leveled him again with your lips. Or Latin for lover. You lack all calibration, either full on or off. Their wings spread between each breath, they glide on the thermals. At Diamond and Bosworth the 52. That or 40 below in the interior, your face against a confluence of optimism and ice. Your double deceived the assassin but ended her double’s career. While you await the 52 to Persia and beyond. The hornet in the sonnet. The arsenic in the apple seed. Their feathers forming wings in the blood. The harder they come. And on the thermals they translate your knowing in their flight.
BADLANDS
Your liquid selves displacing the arid there Twenty traces in twenty towns Your lover gone you fill the space with his photograph The picture arouses an intimacy the lover had not You touch yourself and feel the heat entering your fingertips The blue of the Badlands and just as intense Your touch so what The music scattered well you needn’t peace piece Night lightning and under its violet circuitry your Badlands graph the night You whet a bone to make a knife You conjure sleep to dream a knight His slow metallic gestures glint in the light Les mauvaises terres à traverser mako sica a convalescence from butte to butte Cheat medicine Striations of its buried life The Badlands you’ve just begun to cross
Patrick Cahill received a doctorate at UC Santa Cruz and wrote Whitman’s Photographic Eye: Vision in Walt Whitman’s America. His writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Daguerreian Annual, you say. say (Uphook Press), CLWN WR, Homestead Review, and The Medulla Review, among others. He has received Phelan and Central Coast Writers awards in poetry and coedits Ambush Review, a San Francisco based literary and arts magazine. He also volunteers as a Rec and Park Natural Areas gardener.
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