The Beam Of Blue Light
Will devour
The yellow glow
To create
A zone of
Green light
Imitating
The stars
Which always
Say Here I am
Until they bounce
Off the Earth
With quark-size
Images
Of you and your shadow
You did not know it
But there you are
In the universe
Riding some beams
Of light from Earth
Next to a moth & some rust
Things Live Inside My House
Besides
Me
And move at night
With the silence
Of a spider web
I want to hear
The mouse trap snap
And not listen to the color yellow
In a thimble full of cheese
The fish in the tank
Are swimming too quietly
I want them to wake me up
Crunching the skull
Of a drowned fly or a cockroach
Under The Stone Moon
Shadows
Multiply In West Virginia
On the dark side
Of this black walnut
Leafless in March’s iced lilac midnight
Miles beneath my feet
Sleek new Japanese half -track Cats
Chew a new seam of old forest
High-sulfur New jersey power-grid light
The fossilized eyes
Of extinct birds & flying fish
Embedded in chunks of coal
Roll their stone retinas
Into the floodlights of Wolf Pen tipple
John McKernan – who grew up in Omaha Nebraska in the middle of the USA– is now a retired comma herder after teaching 41 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in West Virginia where he edits ABZ Press. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines.
