Carcanet Poetry

This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it.

Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;
they look calm, but calm is not the truth.
Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.

And yet, more often we were silent, preferring
the river over anything we could say—

Then like holding a mirror up to Apollo
and expecting his face there, when Apollo’s always been
faceless, obviously, being a god.
And the hand still holding the mirror up anyway.
And the face not showing.

All books, Marigold felt, should have animals; people were not enough.

You are the stranger

who gets stranger by the hour.

Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.

You’re a nowhere man misfiring

the very essence of your life, flustering

nothing from nothing and back again.