August Surfers at Assateague

The day is bronze. Their boards like scimitars
gash jugulars the tallest waves expose
by rising with their throats. Up on our dune
the noon-glare stings. Each wobbly bodysuit
contains its lanky host whose outstretched arms
suspend them for a time before they fall
abrupt and clumsy as a drunk. They fall
akimbo through the whitened frothy chop
they’ve cut. The lifeguard says they park at dawn
and wait until a dollhouse ribbon pink
unfurls the sky. They own all splashing then,
disruptors of the tide, who paddle out
and wait. Comported, like coffin-bearing sons,
they let the waiting bend them like a hymn.

Sheep Above Vermilion Lakes

Illingworth Kerr, 1982

nine rams ::  like colonels in denial
nine rams ::  kings of rainbow cliffs
nine rams ::  extractions of Cezanne
nine rams ::  brown as maple bark
nine rams ::  piano benches in snow
nine rams ::  the shape of their forgetting
nine rams ::  a splintered wagon wheel
nine rams ::  gleaming freight cars
nine rams ::  blank hostages of frost                                                               
nine rams ::  their own puffed parkas
nine rams ::  eyebrows on a ridge
nine rams ::  clouds under clouds
nine rams ::  a fraying congregation
nine rams ::  a liturgy of hunger
nine rams ::  worn hermits grazing
nine rams ::  beyond whose torn map
nine rams ::  we have no trail out

Adam Tavel is the author of five books of poetry, including two new collections: Green Regalia (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) and Sum Ledger (Measure Press, 2022). His recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in North American Review, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Western Humanities Review, among others. You can find him online at http://adamtavel.com/.

Published April 18 2022