David Lloyd: California Poets Part 7, Three Poems

David Lloyd

July 1st, 2024

California Poets: Part VII

David Lloyd

Three Poems

RIM 

I

if a body speaks

                        nearing

            there

the dark

            grows lighter

a rim of light

with a voice in it

birth

caesura

opens its lagoon

at the mouth

II

a heart pulsing deep beneath the feathers

beating and still

                        between the hands

this long-suspended pause

                        for breath

breathless

                  utterance

                                    clipped on the wing

glancing

            into the glance

barely bearable

                        blaze

the brightness of the figure

darkening against the light

                        at the door

III

the brightness

            at the rim 

your gesture

            I thought

that brightness

                        driving through mountain rain

                                    the tips of your fingers

                        lifting

the brightness

far off

and the word

            at the edge

                        waiting

the clearing

            (as a lip

and the parting

IV

the mirror gives                                   

nothing

back     

stone slab

slate so

              written over

with signatures

                it can no longer

breathe

wound rounds

in bands 

lagged and

            enarmoured

VECTOR

to break

                             is the vector

                                    of things

a step in space                        

there

    where light wends

            from a given point

                        went through

the zero interval

step in through the subverse

            hearing with your thick ear

                        the breath die

cast out on the vector

flesh arrow

            turning

on my way out

shuttle through the light shed

NOTES TO CASSANDRA

                               For Alice Maher

                        I

                        etched

rock

unearthed

in a sleep                                              what it

of rationed table talk                      is

fit to burst                                                     to have

                                                            a voice

a sand-wrapped

            cable

                 bedded down

not a thing

            breaks through

the flip-flap gloss

                                                            but does

                                                            she now

                        II

What do you have in

            your hands

                                                            beats its wings

unclench                                                          so close

an impossibly swollen tongue

                        heart sore

blood slick

you let slip

            the tow

from the sand cast

bright point of fear

            in the eye gut                           murmur

lit up this night                                                 deep in darkness         

coiled wanting

intimate with stone

Author Bio:

David Lloyd is a poet, playwright, and critic and Professor of English at UC Riverside. Among his publications are Arc & Sill: Poems 1979–2009 (Shearsman 2012) and The Harm Fields (Georgia Review Books, 2022). A chapbook, terra terra, appeared with Magra Books in May 2022. His play, The Press/Le Placard, is available in a bilingual edition from Presses Universitaires du Midi and Three Plays: The Press, Shelter, and The Pact will be published by Three Count Pour in 2024. His most recent critical books include Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (2016) and Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism (2022).