1 Mists open like wings over childhood’s island, green folds riding over the Pacific, valleys overbrimming with beech, pandanus, casuarina, jungle specked red and orange with untasted fruit. From air-fall to landfall, chapter and verse, I think of the spirit moving over the deep, the deep heaving to divide the waters. […]
When the villagers stake out a hundred pigs and two men wade in with clubs, watch how they float, cold as light out of heaven, above the scene. When the pigs scream and buckle with their skulls caved in, remember that not one thing in this world will be spared. Not one leaf. Not one […]
1 The enemy descends through the trees and rises through water. The spring winds ripple the lake—opening salvos in the war against winter. The pulse slows. The hours open. Soon you will be presented with the enemy’s demands. Soon there will be a journey through a dark forest—every story you have been told […]
Caffeinated daybreak, ridge-line over the porch rail. What glides at eye-level above the creek bottom, surveilling the pasture? Peregrine Falcon? Harrier? The world charged like shook foil—that’s a good one. Its colors sharpen as we come out of the inbetween. Wind-gusts rattle these pages, empty interiors, room enough for any grief you’d fill […]
Morning’s work done, attention curdles—–is this pleasure?——into something remote, a phantom erotic of humidity and exercised, now resting, limbs. How the body, the landscape, finds one vibration and for awhile, hums. Is it the mind that goes heavy and then the arms, or the arms first and then the mind? Virginia’s drenched swelter of […]
Aaron Baker’s first collection of poems, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), won the Bakeless Prize in Poetry and the 2009 Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. He received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford. He is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Loyola University Chicago.