Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale

Reginald Shepherd

1963 –

2008

The way air is at the same time
intimate and out of reach

(a void with light inside it
turned on a wheel of wheres)

Stars' lease on sky expires, breathes
in leisures of sparrows, wrens

and casual trees, wet sidewalks
twittering with tattered news, old

leaves (hollow bones and branches)
wind of wish and which and boys

waiting for white kisses, rain
of feathers, clouds saving their later

Suppose this sunlight, day split open
suppose these senses and the information

carried, thing and news of the thing
repeating place, location of position

Birds, for example, remembered
fluttering torn terms, congregations

shimmer of hummingbirds
but when does one see more than one

tumbling bright flesh (sky
at hand) pleating afternoon, banking

on mere atmosphere, primary
colors dividing white into

three clean halves (red, green,
blue-bitter berries rasp, crabapples

crush underfoot), the spectrum
says don't stop there

(smudged light a lapse of attention)
there's never enough world for you

My Mother Was No White Dove

no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk
and foraging for small seeds
My mother was the clouded-over night
a moon swims through, the dark against which stars
switch themselves on, so many already dead
by now (stars switch themselves off
and are my mother, she was never
so celestial, so clearly seen)

Reginald Shepherd

2011

Syntax

Occasionally a god speaks to you,
rutted tollway a flint knife breaching
gutted fields hung on event

horizon, clear cut contradiction
through soybeans and sheared corn: blue
pickup an orange blaze, white letters

Reginald Shepherd

2003

A Muse

He winds through the party like wind, one of the just 
who live alone in black and white, bewildered

by the eden of his body. (You, you talk like winter 
rain.) He's the meaning of almost-morning walking home 

at five A.M., the difference a night makes 
turning over into day, simple birds staking claims 

on no sleep. Whatever they call those particular birds. 
He's the age of sensibility at seventeen, he isn't worth

the time of afternoon it takes to write this down.

Reginald Shepherd

1995

Poems

Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale

More by this poet

My Mother Was No White Dove

Syntax

A Muse

Poems

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Occurrences across the Chromatic Scale

More by this poet

My Mother Was No White Dove

Syntax

A Muse

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