Andrea Moorhead | Featured Poet | July 2016 | Issue XVIII
Introduction to the Poet:
Andrea Moorhead was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1947. Editor of Osiris and translator of contemporary Francophone poetry, Moorhead publishes in French and in English. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Abraxas, The Bitter Oleander, exit, Estuaire, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Ginosko. Poetry collections include From a Grove of Aspen (University of Salzburg Press), Terres de mémoire (Éditions de l’Atlantique, France), De loin and Géocide (Le Noroît, Québec). Translations include Night Watch (Abderrahmane Djelfaoui, Red Dragonfly Press, USA) and Dark Menagerie (Élise Turcotte, Guernica Editions, Canada).
disassociations
words breathe
in the black rose thicket
in the stretching sands
of a distant lake
irregular mirrors
holding the seam
of breaking light.
voices beneath
barely audible
above the cracked clamor
of high voices
almost floating out onto
the sun-field
a single point referring
not to planetary position
but to this murmuring
barely audible
when you move your eyes
flicker suddenly
in the deep dark
beyond the throat.
Icarus had a sister
Impossible shifts under the skin
a light showing through
a pinprick of solar energy
a greening where the bones rise up
and flight no longer impossible
bends around the night
unpunctuated or charted
the brush of an amber wing
where your face turns towards the sun.
winter fire
in the kingdom of the blind suns
scratching and rattling against the windows
hundreds of tiny spheres rolling along the ground
no one picks them up
when the wind is high
the panes are scorched white
and the lamp burns long into the night
casting its shadows on the open door.
North of Niagara
And the light collapsed
before anyone could come
and attempt to pull out the thorns
the broken tips of lava
frozen in the heart
while we spun around the ice fields
lighting fires to ward off death
to stun and startle the coming darkness
blunt the edges of worry
while the blue snow settled around us
and the light collapsed
before anyone could come
and attempt to pull out the fuse
stretch the wires along the heart
while the wind grew fiercer
and we shed the black tears of
another smoldering night
in the green crackling of
your snow-bleached bones.
Displacements
And your black bleak snowing
in the shield of the heart
kindles a low smoldering blaze
from the twisted trunk of fallen
light, the snow-crusted twigs of hemlock
and we have walked far to see
this astonishing, this blue and secret
brooding of another
and yet we can no longer find the path
around the olive trees
around the sticks left in the burn pile
where the beech died and the long, coarse
ropes of grape cradled the burning stones
in the gentle mauve of your wandering heart.
