Far-Fetched (4 page)

to sea once more, old sloop.

What can you do but lie ahull

or run off under bare poles

while trailing lines astern?

Don't you feel your steering fail

and hear your cracked mast groan

in another gust of spindrift,

the night sea full of foam,

and wonder how your hull

could ever survive the coming wave?

You have no seam unsplit, nor God

to call upon in such misfortune.

Though you were built from live oak

and longleaf Georgia pine,

and proudly christened
A-OK,

the frightened sailor finds

no comfort in a name.

Take care, or you'll become

the laughingstock of wind.

Source of all my drudgery

and now my deep concern:

stay well clear of the hidden reef

from which no ships return.

SILVER

I am the warper

caught in a weir

like a muscular tongue

against the teeth

or stuck with a spear

or reeled from the dark

to writhe on a hook

and make no sound

though sometimes heard

to whistle off-key

in a ruffled sound

or estuary

I am the warper

sniffing the air

and sliding across

rough wood and root

en route to pools

of Ira-waru

or branching streams

of Batasuna

though never at home

in the Pyrenees

preferring the deep

and rolling seas

I am the warper

pickled in brine

a cable wrapped

in gutta-percha

walloping north

as a spring unwinds

its subtle ribbon

beneath the keel

in a warp of murky

light and water

here and gone

a silver eel

TING

A whipbird calls through fog

Its whistle sustains and clarifies

until a crack

taut and metallic

punctuates the morning

Across the estuary

an inlet of the Tasman Sea

bellbirds swing their heads

to ventriloquize

a lip of glass

By channels of coolness

the echoes are calling

each call a drop of water

or tap on glazed ceramic

or
tink
of sonar

to sound the empty space

and test how long

how far

tink tink-ting

tink tink-ting

Think of Ming brushwork

and how each island

has its
ting

open to all weather

a pavilion in which to pause

among eroded rocks

and cataracts of moss

along a river

still unscrolling

Just so the
tink
of bellbirds

unchanging yet arrhythmic

cool yet intimate

gathers fog around it

to sound the hush

and make it ring

SCAVENGER

A rail, buff-banded rail,

weaves among the legs

of picnickers who loll at ease

on the buttress roots of fig trees.

It queries fallen fruit

with manners so refined

as to be indeterminate,

its herringbone immaculate.

Aloof though underfoot,

the rail extracts a crust

of pie from picnic residue—

no seediness, no trace

of table-scrap solicitude

for any human hand or face.

SATIN BOWERBIRD

Devout in your compulsion,

you weave a bower of endless night

from something old and something new,

collecting bits of broken glass

from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin,

a single curl of dyed wool,

parrot feathers, and filaments

from your own electric eye.

Behind a palisade of twigs,

you squeeze cobalt straight from the tube

and smear it with a palette knife:

blue teapot with two white cups attending.

Your feathers brush the night sky

with ultramarine straight from the tube,

or else, mixed with a medium

of charcoal, spit, and masticated pulp.

Ratcheting left and right,

you strike a Blue Tip match on chert

and fulminate—
burnt, flagrant, phlegm.

Alert in your devotion,

unseen by any human eye,

you weave a bower of endless night

and pause within, head cocked

to nudge one azure bead

until magnetically aligned,

fussing over vestiges of sky.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These poems have previously appeared in
The Australian, Australian Poetry Journal, Grey, Jubilat, Literary Imagination, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Plume, Poetry, Poetry Northwest,
and
Stolen Island,
and on
www.poets.org
. “Saturday Morning” was published as a broadside by All Along Press. An earlier version of “Owl-Eyed” appeared in
Telepathy
(Paper Bark Press, 2001).

 

A few echoes may warrant attribution: “A Fly from the Early Anglers” draws on Gervase Markham and Izaak Walton, among others. “Bright Thorn” quotes
excrucior
from poem 85 of Catullus. “Night and Day” borrows some phrases from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's
Theory of Colors.
“Ting” quotes a line from Henry Kendall's poem “Bell-Birds”: “By channels of coolness the echoes are calling.” “Satin Bowerbird” adapts a line from William Blake's “Auguries of Innocence”: “Weaves a Bower in endless Night.”

ALSO BY DEVIN JOHNSTON

POETRY

Traveler

Sources

Aversions

Telepathy

PROSE

Creaturely and Other Essays

Precipitations: Contemporary American

Poetry as Occult Practice

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Copyright © 2015 by Devin Johnston

All rights reserved

First edition, 2015

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eISBN 9780374714086

First eBook edition: February 2015