John Perlman

*

in this low land
of sand and
bramble

scandal

Japanese cherry
strewing petals on a

daylong

seawind

*
as I walk
down the dim
hall an old man’s
ghost floats from
the oval mirror
to mimic
me

*
In the gray
hoodoo of new
light in the pelagic
luster of ice pearls lit
on black halyards of limbs
the crackpot cryopath halloos the
fleeing gibbous moon like a flayed master
of the flying dutchman clutching the shattered
bowsprit spies a cobalt iceberg crying land land ahoy
above his unregenerate gibbering wraithy crew of bone

*
KASE MARU

                        summer grass

                          all that remains

                            warriors’ dreams

                                                              -Basho

deep in the hold of
the sunken warship

scrolls of barbed
wire incubating

blue-striped
angelfish

*

the emaciated
spooks of if
suffer

vacancy

however
newborn the
memories

departed
in situ

lineage
without
ligatures

vocables
without
tongue

sights
unsocketed

*

september’s fanged

flowerless rosecane

doing the demon

samba with

gusts of a

tropical

squall

John Perlman is the author numerous titles of poetry, including Kachina, Homing, Swath, and The Natural History of Trees. He lives with his wife Jan in a clearing in the woods close to the tidewater.

John’s A Walk around the Lake was #2 in the Empty Hands Broadsides series.