Election Year

A jet of mere phantom Is a brook, as the land around Turns rocky and hollow. Those airplane sounds Are the drowning of bicyclists. Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps. You asked for my autobiography. Imagine the greeny clicking sound Of hummingbirds in a dry wood, And there you’d have it. Other birds Pour over the walls now. I'd never suspected: every day, Although the nation is done for, I find new flowers.

Gihon

They all wore little hats
Vermont that  I
Can see, the river its coronet
Of yellow beetles—crawling,
Flying—the flowers wearing
The river for a hat.
I can see that 
When I stand alone
Upon this acre as now
Sober and living, the same, the same.

They wore:
Hats.
They are not dead,
John and Johnny and John,
Which is a fine name for a river,
Only gone.
Having death out of the way,
The ill-fitting suicide discarded,
Pajama-like, on imaginary sand:
Good, good. We stand.

Donald Revell

2012

Vietnam Epic Treatment

It doesn't matter
A damn what's playing—
In the dead of winter
You go, days of 1978 -
79, and we went
Because the soldiers were beautiful
And doomed as Asian jungles
Kept afire Christ-like
In the hopeless war
I did not go to in the end
Because it ended.

The 20th-century?
It was a war
Between peasants on the one side,
Hallucinations on the other.
A peasant is a fire that burns
But is not consumed.
His movie never ends.
It will be beautiful
Every winter of our lives, my love,
As Christ crushes fire into his wounds
And the wounds are a jungle.
Equally, no matter when their movies end,
Hal

Donald Revell

2005

My Mojave

Sha-
Dow,
As of
A meteor
At mid-
Day: it goes
From there.

A perfect circle falls
Onto white imperfections.
(Consider the black road,
How it seems white the entire
Length of a sunshine day.)

Or I could say
Shadows and mirage
Compensate the world, 
Completing its changes
With no change.

In the morning after a storm,
We used brooms. Out front,
There was broken glass to collect.
In the backyard, the sand
Was covered with transparent wings. 
The insects could not use them in the wind
And so abandoned them. Why
Hadn't the wings scattered?

Donald Revell

2003

Poems

Election Year

More by this poet

Gihon

Vietnam Epic Treatment

My Mojave

Poems

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Election Year

More by this poet

Gihon

Vietnam Epic Treatment

My Mojave

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