WHAT ARE YOU WEARING
I was in a mulberry that grew like a willow
thin limbs vinelike in a skirt of leaves
Through laddered shadows I saw our Chevrolet
and the simple geometry of parking in white lines
strawberries beyond
I wore a deck chair an adirondack
ribs upright broad arms and a failing spine
Night painted the hills and spread a black towel
around my shoulders then came the meteors
a necklace of now with then around the edges
I was wearing a hammock like the moon
crescent from weight and criss-crossed
with small birds sweeping back and forth
as if laying spider silk that could explain
how the argiope hung its net above the creek
I could have dressed in feathers
I could have even liked opera
HANDMADE EXPERIENCE
I am reading small books
that can be opened with one hand
and held as if cecropias
wings spread wide as pages
Amy makes them
They confirm my wish to live fully
in the intensity of silence
and within the beautifully accurate
language of Gray’s Anatomy
Earth is a bookmark birthmark
I hold a cobalt glazed bowl
full of babylonia spirata
from the Indian Ocean
resolving wishes into fulfillment
A fog bank book moves downshore
cohesive opaque yet ghost made
a frenzy of cells a magnificent glimpse
a sunset sewn in gold threads
and I am still in love all flowers are
Forget Me Nots
To protect such preciousness
colophons once bristled with curses
AQUAMARINE
Is any word more watery than this
I close my book The ocean
is turning its pages faster than my own
a notebook with helpful tables of conversions
how many ounces in a mile
Above high tide a rain releases esters and alcohols
from lichens and live oaks
The future is lights and darks back to back
a continuing revelation with breathing inlets
eyelets like wearing a seeing shirt
Even time was discovered to be water soluble
The swollen moon could shrink to a button
Rocks were ducks with their heads wing-hidden
Ducks were rocks with their oxides showing
The miraculous is so everyday it lasts
Even the wavering pages in my book meet the guidelines
for permanence
TURNING IN
It is what we call sleep
An account and description
For some hours we had forgotten
distracted by phone calls and bombing
of distant villages wondering
whether plaid was the true beginning
of abstraction
Then some faint reminder condenses
from a long hallway
the words you are reading seem a kite
let out on a long string
the page pumiced snowy with erasures
We slip from hard facts into florilegia
a drift without noticing
a parade and a horse startled
that couldn’t help stepping backwards
onto the child on the curb
a voice of someone not present but speaking
in your voice vortices like smoke
like swirls from rowing
We are inside
We become the tradition that after a query
is a curl and a dot
a squiggle become quizzical through use
A tree of crows discussing at once
what comes after seven
ADJUSTMENTS
It was not promised it was just land
and it was not another language
just the dictionary upside down
You get used to it
looking on the stove to read time
watching lop sided flowers
slide off bedspreads and spring
handing over its once fresh belongings
The glimpse is underappreciated
as a source of knowledge
a gust through a sway of sumac
a promising shadow almost resolved
a tremor indicating an edge about to let go
the angle of repose in granular material
and a village meets the valley floor
in disarray and disaster
Death is a whisper till it shouts
Allan Peterson is the author of five books, most recently: Other Than They Seem, winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize from Tupelo Press; Precarious, 42 Miles Press 2014, a finalist for The Lascaux Prize; Fragile Acts, McSweeney's, a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle and Oregon Book Awards. A visual artist as well as a poet, he divides his time between Florida and Oregon.