Seth Howard


THEY SAY IT ISN’T WHAT IT ONCE WAS
     for Cassandra Cammarata

I no longer think of morning’s Waxen Pears
in the light half-asleep, half a sinew of
some hazy memory. I climb down the stair,
my knee-muscles stronger than they once
were. A sharp pain inside that shoots up
from the heart, as if something were missing,
or I had forgotten the name of the gate that
leads to the spectrum of Light & Heat.
The sound of morning bleeds, & I, half-alive
half-starved, wander past the halls of junction
crossed in the havens of thin wheat, in the
missives of Mind Journeys. I sleep into an
evening cloaked in a mist of my own slap-dash
composition, & she is Quiet or barely seen,
I almost fail to sense her in those shallows
of rain-showers, I nearly retract from the elastic
pull as pearls pour in the air like grain. I am
nowhere at once, nowhere that they can
find me, but the Bright Eyes of a woman who
wakes to the light of the rain-rasp against
the glass, remembers me a moment, & is gone.
I slip through the cask of peaches & plum,
the soft light of cloud calls beyond our mind’s
eye swirling in the spiral of time’s chase.
The Ghost Cave I enter, a grey-zone, the slow
drone of cicadas in the mornings, I don’t hate.




WE STILL SPOKE AT TIMES

I wake, pulling the blinds open to snow
April 3^rd, I thought
of what I’d yet to do…
a letter
from a friend, she wrote in
Pinkish Japanese, the liquid words, gelatinous, pulse on the screen
an album by Kirsty MacColl, recalling
that evening aside the Sushi bar, the care taken
to press each roll, impression
touched with the red of Masago, layers
of avocado, Unagi…
Still snow in the window, or now
seeming to cease, an evening reading Proust
the words wash over my mind, I dreamt of
her again, the slight bite of coffee, I listened for her voice
the thread of presence that runs
beneath, so as to identify
the light of the life I saw inside the dream
we live in waking, the workings of my world that I alone seemed to know
A chime on my phone as I reached for the check, Megumi
her name
“a benefaction”
I take into my hands like pink
Petals that shine in evening bloom…



Seth Howard is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where he studied English and philosophy. Lover of things Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese, he has traveled extensively within these countries. In his spare time he enjoys reading philosophy and Manga, various volumes of experimental poetry, and practicing Zen meditation. He currently lives in New London, where he co-edits CAPSULE.
 
 
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