If Tiny Crystals Form Close to the Earth’s Surface, They Create Diamond Dust
My antler heart grows hooves.
I follow the lead from the pack.
Find shelter in a drunken forest—
what species isn’t at risk.
Insulating properties of snow
will keep me warm—
trapped air between each flake.
With body heat and earth-transfer heat
my home becomes a snowbank.
It’s not the hare’s scream
that haunts,
it’s the antecedent silence.
XXX
Field
A field’s snow is a ruled wind.
Harnessed, flattened, white gold.
Stalks—stiff.
This brainy circuit breathes beneath.
Sun liquefies sog into steamy puddles.
Sunken kiss for grass, soil’s lid green-thickens.
The call for the flying to come—
transformation’s fast hatch.
Walk the field. Feel the grasses tick.
Bend to pluck what once was ice, white.
Take a blade of wind
in your teeth—whistle.
XXX
Whistle
Thick foliage fools—
My longing
peels—
Yes bird
you made me
hear from
father’s mouth—
what angered
then I ache for
XXX
Star
They don’t notice one iris
carries an unbalanced green
or the blue vein snaking
my neck. I’m perfect
in their glares, the filling
light. I pose between clicks—
the take of take. Dark nights
my vacancy grows. Other nights
I fly through underground springs.
Mornings my mirror stares
back with such weight, a heavy task
for such a fine-boned thing.
XXX
Catherine Graham is a Toronto-based writer. Among her six poetry collections The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and appears on their Ultimate Canadian Poetry List. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her debut novel Quarry won an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for fiction, “The Very Best!” Book Awards for Best Fiction and was a finalist for the Fred Kerner Book Award. She teaches at the University of Toronto. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @catgrahampoet.
XXX
Featured image, “What is it?” by JLS Photography on Flickr.