ALAIN SHERTER

Alain Sherter, 38, is a journalist living and working in New York City. His poetry has appeared in such publications as The Pedestal Magazine and Eleven Bulls.

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GARDENING BY NIGHTFALL

Dusk spills fellside, dusts waterıs edge with threads of smoke
and garnet. Outside, our cottage life suns on. After coffee,
bending in the cut peach of day, weıll jostle bees in their nectaries
and stack pollen grains for the day, close, when winterıs underlip

juts ridgeward. The garden talks to itself, sowing non sequiturs:
German rampion is the root of evening primrose! No argument there.
Whatıs more, I answer, Shakers stole your marigolds to soothe gangrene.
Yes? Yes, and a monk pruned your flowering peas to peer up the

ash-hemmed skirt of the 20th century. Now we swim the
ooze between life and non-life, shivering the featheredge.
There is no time to plant holly. Maybe itıs been here all along,
secreting berries like red pearls. You know, Iıll tell you.

Crack open shale after 10 million years and the DNA of magnolia
looks fresh enough to eat. Seal it up in paraffin for next year.
Father taught me that, remember? Gloze the past so it
feels half-born, sewing up my remnants in the nakeding

earth of noon. Pull taproot like a tooth. All that remains, the grit
of our frictions, must pour like deliverance through the veins
of a sonhood buried deep beneath this comma of soil.
Who can I blame for that? Someone must mark our descents and

misgivings, or imagine them. Tendril the earth with new grief.
At times, I can think of my death only as a vine that must be trued,
restored to its proper shape. What shape is that, and what will happen
to it? Such questions. See? Our wood thrush is back, as if he never left.

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ROCK MAPLES

or the jazz
of copter blades

unwinged syncopate

me, indehiscent
among winter seeds

among fallout

silviculture, or
high-tensile

industry of

pulp
black-bowelled

the reach of sand

planished
over, into

bodies

into women
their pistillate vanquish

ball-bearinged

anguish distilled
burned green by sun and

rocket

want, of howl
loss, of wanting

now they guzzle earth
a repined

moment of becoming

the blastemic purge
of teeth and buttons

plant shoots

descending, or
set free