Toward the West
After Diane Seuss
I can only give one answer:
to this naked-bulb apartment: there are
no voices left to parrot, no ink
with which to stain the page, no links to click
when drizzle wicks from eaves to tap
the empty barrow upturned below
the cloud-clotted canopy leaking
its lake of sweat onto what?
Azure partitions fissuring
the hanging nimbus narrow
as though the sun can’t tolerate
another day. While toward the west,
the harbor floats a white-rigged ship
on tides that lift up none.
C. John Graham’s poetry has appeared in The Laurel Review, Birmingham
Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Taos Journal of Poetry and Art, and the
anthology Off Channel, among other publications.
Graham lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and until retirement, worked at Los
Alamos National Laboratory’s particle accelerator facility. He is now a search and
rescue pilot and continues a lifelong spiritual inquiry.
The Marbled Sigh 