4 Poems

by Lea Marshall

 

Here

 

This field blossoms

with stones.

Your name scratched

leaves quartz

dust on green grass.

 

If a rabbit came here

if a rabbit sprang away

 

your name torn loose

from my closed eye

from its waking

 

under root,

bone.

 

 

Genus: Corvus

 

Now, the evening the after the birth of the First Dalai Lama, bandits broke into the family’s house. The parents ran away and left the child. The next day when they returned and wondered what had happened to their son, they found the baby in a corner of the house. A crow stood before him, protecting him.

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet

 

Wind through lacebark pines

and the thick voices of crows.

My mother’s face filled the sky.

 

Roof tiles cracking under footfalls

—she turned her head

            abrupt sunset.

Footsteps running, shouting

the goat’s bell receding.

The birds came.

 

Warm behind a black wing

a voice like the stony path

            gather the murder

soft scratching on my cheek.

 

My eyes closed, my fingers curled

into down. A firm fluttering heart

mirrored mine. She left me. My mother left.

 

All night the bird’s breath, its clawed,

careful steps sifted my rage into sand.

 

At sunrise the crow’s dark eye

and mine. The crow’s light spine

and mine.

                Footsteps running,

wing beats

    her voice ragged,

feathers graze the sky

                tears down my cheeks, hers

or mine?

My small breaths pour cool as water

over her parched and open hands.

 

 

Innermost Moon

 

The satellites that took Galileo

by the throat spin silently, looping

ellipses round Jupiter. They grin,

still, at their first observer’s

shock –

 except Io,

who doesn’t give a shit about some

astronomer’s annunciation

and the subsequent human outrage.

She just relishes the tidal locking

that keeps her facing that gas giant,

flaunting her sulphurous volcanism

before his dizzy eye

Io’s volcanic ejecta produce a large plasma torus around Jupiter.

Teach you to wrap me in clouds and take what’s mine.

 

 

Trace

 

Leaves at the alley’s edge

curled round a dark penny

until a tall man passed,

listening for found things.

In his small wind the leaves

shifted, and at the scritch

he stooped to draw the penny

lightly from amongst them

then wrapped it in linen,

tucked it in his pocket.

 

As he gazed through a shop window

at knotted vines trailing flowers

across the blue field of a worn

carpet, the penny slid free,

dropped through a hole

into the lining of his jacket,

and began to sing to itself

there in the sifting darkness.

 

Later, he heard while walking

soft drifts of sound,

a hollow coppery voice

like a bird in a cistern,

felt the small weight of change

tapping his thigh and then,

as he passed a sidewalk filigree

of leaf-prints in concrete

his heart lifted a little,

like the grass.

 

Lea Marshall is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is also Assistant Chair/Producer in the Department of Dance & Choreography. Her work has been published in Anderbo.com , diode poetry journal, and is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Lea Marshall
Lea Marshall is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is also Assistant Chair/Producer in the Department of Dance & Choreography. Her work has been published in Anderbo.com , diode poetry journal, and is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review.