Journey
after Miltos Sachtouris
When I was walking up the street
and the moon burned my hands
the baker’s daughter the owl would awaken
then I’d go out and call the Night
When I was wading down the river
the tanner had nowhere to sleep
her secret wounded me in the chest
then I’d go out and call the Night
When I was going [...]
I JUST HAVE TO GET THROUGH THIS
Summer stayed no longer than a sparrow.
Medication is passed over a trembling lip.
The postcard arrives one day too late.
A man notes he’ll get an Asian hooker if
he’s dying, maybe if he isn’t. A spider
in the woodpile ends up in the fire.
One beggar spits in the air at another.
The [...]
Capitalism
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
—Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”
Three hundred times as heavy as our sun.
The Bubble Observer scientists report
buzzing and whizzing and gesturing in a ball
of swollen crimson gas burning standingl
ike a braintrust of firebrands and cake batter.
See the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
for updates, they say. [...]
SMALL STORY
So the tree. And the wrongful
way the wind de-leaved it.
Down to bare bark and skid-wracked
branches. But I’m exaggerating of course.
This is the law of all taking. Savour the small moments—
apples with their red out, skins glossed to luster.
SAMARITAN
I found a leaf the other day,
red and tattered on the sidewalk.
The wind kept lifting its
papery [...]
These sonnets originally appeared in Midnight Found You Dancing (1986), Strands the Length of the Wind (1993), and Fireflies in the Magnolia’s Grove (2004). Smith’s essay is an abridged version of the introduction to Island Voices: John Smith (UPEI Integrated Promotions, DVD format, 2006).
Poems can be complicated critters. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to say enough [...]
What is that little grating chink
in college girls’ voices, like the chirp
of glass marbles rubbed together
in a child’s palm?
Always a wild openness
to the left and right of our path,
a humming in the high grasses.
PRESS
I once preferred a keen and perfect
cutting edge, a right-angled sheet trimmed neat
with borders that might snick an errant
grey blue stone bifurcated
by a band of sparkling quartz,
glad eye from the Pleistocene,
it sits on my mind’s table.
Like sadness, it has the quality
of being wholly passive.
Dark to its core, it glows at dusk
like a dying bulb. Dry but shaped
by water, flung up by streams
and tides it exerts a force
against all expectation.
Seems to be saying anything
may happen: has and will.
One day, you may pick up
that stone and pitch it, leaving
behind a small depression.