Dearest, it was a night
That in its darkness rocked Orion's stars;
A sighing wind ran faintly white
Along the willows, and the cedar boughs
Laid their wide hands in stealthy peace across
The starry silence of their antique moss:
No sound save rushing air
Cold, yet all sweet with Spring,
And in thy ...Read more

Even this
brief thought is endless. A
man speaks as if unaware of the
erotic life of the ampersand. In the
isolate field he comes to count one by
one the rare butterflies as they
die. He says witness is to say what
you mean as if you mean it. So many
of them are the color of the leaves
they ...Read more

I wake myself imagining the shape
of the day and where I will find
myself within it. Language is not often
in that shape,

but sentences survive somehow
through the islands of dark matter,

the negative space often more important
than the positive.

Imagine finding you look at the...Read more

My childhood house is stripped,
bared, open to the public.
The for-sale sign impales

the front pasture, grass
is cut and prim, no trimmings
left to save.

Women in sable parade
through halls and men in
tailored suits talk about

dimensions. They don't know
lizards ...Read more

as if a road could be otherwise but geometry
defies the man who is lost on the road that
the trees want to reach and reach down
to his walking on
along a verticality that defies
the requirements of normative perspective
and so he will reach, and the trees against chalk-
the gesture of the arm extended is...Read more

Serious moonlight fell brightly on the mountains tonight
Elegant moonlight fell loudly on the deer asleep in the yard
Broken moonlight fell splendidly on the swing set
Moody moonlight fell hard on the weedy pond
Pretty moonlight fell recklessly on the garden beds
Fierce moonlight fell thoughtfully on the recycling ...Read more

"really, it is not the
business of the gods to bake clay pots." They did not
do it in this instance. A few
revolved upon the axes of their worth
as if excessive popularity might be a pot;

they did not venture the
profession of humility. The polished wedge
that might have split the firmament
...Read more

My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring ...Read more

My dream lives close to my lungs.
Sometimes I feel it as a pen
spilling ink in the dark purse
of my breathing. My body
lives here in Colorado,
in an apartment with a few plants.
I am what the experts refer to
as history, a small totality
making its way to the future.
In the evening, I inherit...Read more

Thrushes, alert for opportunity,
sleep in winks of thirty seconds or less.
Has Guinness tracked the longest sigh on record
and was it exhaled in exasperation or ecstasy?

In the measure of apothecaries, one scruple
equals twenty grains, a lot of data to debunk.

Four centuries ago a watchmaker set ...Read more

I heard it on the radio,
A woman's voice saying,
I like for you to be
The space far away

Where poetry figures out
Why you are still
But not absent,
Why you can hear

From somewhere
What's coming next.
But her voice could not touch
What had flown away.

Nor...Read more

The forest rings so wide, it is the world. The sky, ocean, hand
In hand rising to tides, particulate excreta. The river mouth
The moon lights in blindness through the forest, hot, tumbling silver by houses
Like mushrooms crowded. Ladder by ladder, neighbors pass ore in ladles

While this planet hushes into a cinder....Read more

At the columbarium dug
by hand, a man points to where rock
doves would be brought to nest, their eggs

tended by priests, and the cave locked
at sundown, guarded by hired
knives. The flock meant meat for the dry

times; saltpeter; yolks needed to bind
portraits to walls, to raise a sky
...Read more

Blue through the window burns the twilight;
Heavy, through trees, blows the warm south wind.
Glistening, against the chill, gray sky light,
Wet, black branches are barred and entwined.

Sodden and spongy, the scarce-green grass plot
Dents into pools where a foot has been.
Puddles lie spilt in the road a ...Read more

. . . It is the last survivor of a race
Strong in their forest-pride when I was young.
I can remember when, for miles around,
In place of those smooth meadows and corn-fields,
There stood ten thousand tall and stately trees,
Such as had braved the winds of March, the bolt
Sent by the summer lightning, and the ...Read more

A plausible place, this sea of air.
Somehow, the fragments of a later
Time get pulled out of the memory.
The earth surges up, the snow covers
Us. The blackened lungs of a bird
Cry out in the shaped bones
Of my hands. Walls of dust,
The bright little stars above us,
Who can crawl into the tiny black...Read more

bend and kiss what
you feel
contingent of what is

not
right now paranoia
the lands like you awful

lot due to stress of weather
the only place
by which

to be tidy is out

of this delicate wave
that the intercourse is

is born
as nothing ...Read more

i.m. Scott David Campbell (1982-2012)

Streetlights were our stars,
hanging from the midnight
in a planetary arc
above each empty ShopRite
parking lot-spreading
steam-bright
through the neon dark-
buzzing like ghost locusts,
trembling in the chrome
trance of an electrical charge <...Read more

I have eaten my dinner
Do not despair
I have eaten my dinner and the Devil

When he comes will see

I have intact

A peripatetic philosophy

That prizes above all

Not fame

Not virtue

Never grace

But burnt asparagus ...Read more

At the May Day parade, my mask made of moss
and bark, my hair full of flowers, my friend beside me,
her pretty red mouth under the hawk's beak
of her mask of green sage.

At the children's pageant, music
died in the speakers. The shadow
of a crow passed over. My hair a crown
of flowers, yellow and ...Read more