Issue 26: Stuart Cooke
Verge
The night’s worn down by the ridge
until it breaks apart and day unfolds
like a chapter down the street.
Branches twist into salmon fat
and sand ribbons and strap
my body to the glass limit.
A canyon’s intentions
are dwarfed by a lanky huntsman’s
endless jaw, all black cavities
and stripped light, entombed heat
pouring into that vast, bubbling stomach
crimped by a ruined castle’s tuber,
its ponderous orbits of cicada and verge
until pink flames crack the canopy.
Slowly, the sodden bowl’s wrenched free.
Gumnuts mime the chorus,
sandstone and iron-
stone shiver with rubble,
the opening returns, its slumbering muscle
twitching with the residue of
the current that cut
through clumps of bush
to scrawl its name upon the lens,
back when billows nestled and chattering
magnified into ache, or swoon.
Laguna
The eye is in the mind,
molten lens,
grassed then hurried
with shiver,
bristled with talk.
To touch it
is a yarn, an element
of fable augurs
the drizzle,
each drop slips into a quick
little mouth, busy copper
pops in the Central Desert,
where words carve the laws
of their origin, let Country
ferment, or rest
in the strobes
at the edges of vowels.
After, strips of light
blow down the valley to sketch
an old bed, the eye
lost on a somnambulant talus.
Wet forests thread
plains of thorny bushes
to slogans of bleached-
white blossom.
The angle is released from the earth
into the nerves, which melt
into white strings
down the saddle,
a tome in trickles
like the skeletons
of migrating songs.
Stuart Cooke is an Australian poet and translator. His latest books are the poetry collection Lyre and a translation of Gianni Siccardi's The Blackbird. He lives in Brisbane.
Copyright © 2021 by Stuart Cooke, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
