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By Alexander Etheridge
Lost is the Name
Lost in a silent land — or swept up
by a cloud of whispers. Entire worlds
left alone in deep space, abandoned
to their savage winters,
their burning stretches of ice
over mountains and
empty valleys.
❃
Lost is the name
of God, and dim are the nights
when our snowy dream meets the mind
of every dead
dreamer — each of those drifting
through cold forests of
paradise.
❃
Lost are the lives
blazing by. Who are we
after such ruin? Without knowing it,
lost is all we ever wanted —
gone, blind, and broken
is what we cherish. We dream on
with a dark joy.
Our One Star
There’s whispering in the hills
all night
from orchard trees
there under stars slowly becoming
something else
another kind of light another
kind of mind
thinking one thought
of changing
fire
And our own ghostly star
once with petals of
unbearable heat
Our Black Carriage
We ride slowly down our shadowy
path, in our horse-driven
funeral carriage.
We forget
the same faces in the same rainfall,
we forget being forever vanished.
Our memories lose themselves.
The way home is stony and
barren — we’re following a hush
through blue desert cloudfall.
We’re abandoned by everything
abandoned — and gone is gone.
What returns after so long,
what comes back to the heart
is an ancient way of dreaming,
like seeing with eyes of
an underworld, an otherlife.
We ride over the creaky bridge,
invited by a pure grief, a perfect
word.
Go with me to the far side
of lightlessness, where the first
thought was born — thinking itself
into oblivion,
held in our hands,
almost there — eternal and never,
riding with us through fresh rain,
here under the halfmoon.
Continuum
Thunder-welts
rattle a lush of wickerbranches
outside my window —
drifts of ashy stars
over lakes and burials,
Heaven’s faces
closed over with light, mud tracks of horseback armies
mirrored in a bead,
candles,
turns of smoke in
choir lofts.
A fire going out.
A fire lit.
❃
One sustenance —
each time the echo sends the voice back up.
Two poles and a white connective heat . . .
Faces in the photograph
changing at the speed of trains.
❃
Tracked into breezes by wildfire,
figures wilting in petal smoke,
delicate as onion feathers.
Incineration and a next world, flowers
light as glances . . . fire-lifted,
the flowers change.
Earth written by scent
and ash, then falling from sense
to come up in our eyes another day.
❃
Letter to Franz Wright
For a long time you didn’t speak a word,
waiting by snowy windows in an empty
room — even you weren't there.
Avid and bereaved, you read the stormclouds.
You told me to write what I don’t know, to become
rain, to taste black grains of eternity.
Where are you now, what book
are you beginning?
Go with me again
to the outskirts — lead me through my own
midnight hail, up a mountain path
to the choir lofts of Heaven.
For a split-second we can watch the same
lightning, the same shadows . . .
I can see it, the page you left unfinished —
an elliptical miracle, and I’m grateful
to be burning alive, grateful for questions
you gave me, who’ve I been, who’ll I become
in the nothing, and in nothing
but pure light?
- Alexander Etheridge
About The Author:
Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998.
His poems have been featured in Scissors and Spackle, Ink Sac, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others.
He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.