Thursday, August 15, 2013

Matthew Drew Williams- Three Poems


Downsizing the Drive
In short, it was not so simple
to make the memory
of tonight’s drive home from work
compact enough for my mind.

Everything had to be condensed:
the headlights on the road had
to be repurposed into a petite
remembrance, the miles traveled

had to be miniaturized, and
the moon which shown through
my windshield had to be folded up
and creased along its calderas

before being small enough
to store in my psyche. Such hard work
done to retain tonight’s drive;
a dull memory better left forgotten.


Breakfast on the Veranda
Aside from admiring how
the dawn kneads indigo into
the hill-hoarding horizon,
we watch legions of liver-spotted,
 lily-yellow leaves break away
from tree limbs and carve
clinquant curlicues into
the air as they descend. 

In this moment, while the two
of us sit in silence and make
short work of marred milk
and toast masked in marmalade,
I know that not even the pigeons,
perched in narrow proximity
on a nearby power line,
are closer than we are now. 
 


Reverse
The hurricane reverses
its path and gyrates

towards the coast
from which it originally
made landfall—

returning rubble piles
back into the homes

they once were
as it rolls retrograde
into the gulf—

all of its lightning,
looking like cockeyed

crucifixes,
recedes back into the sky. 

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