Poof!

A shark swims into the bay, swirls, and then rises with the ugly grin of millennia.

A match flame to a cigar, years later a campfire, and long after a house on fire.

Love—to forget language and act on instinct, its indestructible form.

—Something written on a piece of paper after an astonishing event. That paper
found a long time later.

I am, I am, she said, licking a grape Popsicle in July. Make it last, he said right after.

It seemed as though she had leapt toward her own cremation.

A few books shining like the wood of trees. —Ones that I’ve climbed or held.

—Her fish scales, her chains, the woman’s headless
wings and blown

tunic of Parian marble. —The wet-see-thru
camisole. By sea she’s

arrived, lighting on the ship’s prow. One leg
thrust forward, the draped sails

Mark Irwin

2022

When within ourselves in autumn we feel the autumn

I become very still, a kind of singing, and try to move

like all things green, in one direction, when within ourselves

the autumn moves, thickening like honey, that light we smear

on faces and hands, then touch the far within one another,

something like autumn, and I think when those who knew

the dead, when they fall asleep, then what, then what in autumn

when I always feel I’m writing in red pencil on a piece

of paper growing in thickness the way a

Mark Irwin

2017

Now light turns the room a deep orange at dusk and you

think you are floating, but in truth you are falling, and the fall

is so slow, yet precise, like climbing a ladder of straw. Now

leaning forward, you open your hands that keep opening. Is

this what Yes feels like? Making a shore where no water was?

Mark Irwin

2017

Poems