Andrea Moorhead

Article Posted in: Featured Poet

Andrea Moorhead | Featured Poet | July 2016 | Issue XVIII

Introduction to the Poet:

Andrea Moorhead PoemsAndrea 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.

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