Seth A. Howard


SUNRISE

This morning stillness hums, a metal
Wire pulled taut. Keystones of
Your past clink
In rays of moonlight. The glyph is
Your symbol rich ambition. & yet,

It is time. Some ash ring lifts from
Us. I listen. Day is a dry reed, life
A question that she runs
With. Sleep induced hallucination.

The geese have left for the winter.
Pools glint with cherry blossoms
& we call. The sky is held before
A power, the glazed grey stones,
The rain. We
Humans who aspire to greatness.

Illusive rays cut into true voids
As stars blink, now there, now
Gone. I long to
Go back to the city, city of my lost dreams.

EXPERIMENTAL CASSIS

Somewhere amid strands of light, a moth flutters into dust & forgetting.  Time is halved.  Orange road 
these motions, a maze or a mortician. 

Deep vermillion.  I see the moon glance off the waves, a glaze of suns submerged.

                                                                      O lost haven of childhood.

                                                                      Sequence of stars cross of   

visions in flowing silk & dry chambers.  I hear the rustle of leaves where the fountain gurgles & the girls 
splash in silences of autumn.

I asked her if she loved me, in the immortal afternoon.

                                                                      A sequence of elms a séance of waves.

I feel a cool wind of a day conjured.  “Let’s meet here, exactly a week later, from this present moment.”  
We agreed.  The night a black dragon (not crow), the sun a rose of fire.  



RETURN

I begin with a breath, where the coin 
Is balanced on the edge.  

What does it mean to be a poet
But to endure?  These 
Folds of blue are tiny cranes.

The slow music remembered, or was 
It evoked?  I sit up.

My mind is full but empty of thought
I feel a quiet rage. 

Held in the bonds of history, kept still by the swans
That blend into the grey & green.

CALIPSO

Somedays the rain is a goddess of pearl
& her wrist 
A 
Pale moon
The sun
O tower of cities
Where 
I call
To no answer
Life
Ignites
A 
Signal blinks in hungry voids
I speak
But 
Does she listen?
Far
Out
A 
Cloud of 
Red
A pond of grey & green
In 
Settsu 
Pro
vin
ce
They sip from gold-leafed bowls
I call
To the goddess
Of 
Pale
Wrists
Hips
Of
Moonlight
Mes
cal
ine 
Is.



LINES WRITTEN IN A STATE OF LIMBO

To the inconsolable brave, to the soldiers of fire & freedom.  Wake from your liminal sleep, in the fused 
shadows of dream.  
                                                  This vent through which the wind enters,

                               a dark globe, or New Year’s bell.  These fires, the white sheet

cool in the watery temple.  
                                                                    Drive, she said, along a surface.  Within a depth, night enters  
& a child sleeps.  I hear a song lift from the blue chasm,

                                                 where she sews darkness into a shroud.   

Seth A. Howard is the author of Out of the East, & Waters from a Well, two experimental chapbooks. His work has appeared in Otoliths, BlazeVOX [books], unarmed journal, Big Hammer, Oddball Magazine, Chronogram, Saudade, & Elephant. He graduated from the University of Connecticut, & attended Sophia University in Tokyo for three years. In his spare time, he enjoys the practice of Zazen, watches J-drama, & studies French in New London where he resides.
 
 
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