By Gray Tolhurst
bridge to bring the language together
(Babylon)
divided the channels
(woven)
you can just as well do the one thing as the other,
that is to say where my reason and reflection say:
you cannot act and yet here is where I have to act
to act upon faith but reflection has closed the road
cannot do otherwise because I am a reflection
festival of aerial crossings
the world without memory
a disappearance of bodies
(a component of the body
like any other
living dust
light-signals
to hear voices psychic homeland
identical days the territorial body
all feeling optical oscillating
I feel a moon within me
same bay as in the eyes
curve of glass floating
to the sky my hand grazes it
it is not a facsimile
of this worried field
lights in the pale ashes of eyes
as if they could hold a form such as my own in their water
I become inherited
I fill her blood with my own
even names collapse and form
burial grounds
lay your hand off it
relax control of what little is given
simply speak, it is enough for now
(Three Photographs)
we were in the dry lakebed
tools had become just shape
sky water knit by trees
•
doubt creeps in
somehow it is like smoke
the evidence of a death
•
heaped under white sky
each house already a ruin
built like that
from Topographies
a bridge into the sky
(interrupted)
museum of glass structures
the interior of the piano
each note an element
the root of a sun
sidereal woman is the house
the hardwood floor I am
within it a glass of wine
swimming
how couldn’t we
the room a plain room
a pale yellow organ
color blooms into objects
the flash of a bulb beneath a door
crucified on the lawn a red star
a decaying alphabet
the Haunted West
spot-lit as if a set
lost among the flowers
blues as ghost music
I hear it from beyond
train cutting the town in two
a vibrating glass speaking
in two the room bisected
my grandmother amongst glass animals
landscape of bones and rusted stoves
skeleton of a dog complete
twinned in others
the sea stuck in my eyes
Gray Tolhurst is currently based in San Francisco, CA where he lives in an old convent. He holds an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University where he was the art editor of Fourteen Hills Literary Review. His poems have appeared in Comma Poetry, New American Writing, and Switchback. He is also a musician and plays bass in psychedelic rock band the Coo Coo Birds.
