Lost Is The Name & Other Poems

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.