Patrick Cahill: California Poets Part 8, Four Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
Patrick Cahill
Four Poems
If I wake up falling
sideways out of a chair
If I walk through a vertical rain
If I am the wind settling on an empty shed
If I am a starling shaking off water
in puddled grass
If I am the mist falling through sunlight
If I am a note endlessly struck on the dog-eared air
If I am the man twitching on the corner
If I am the current coursing through his body
If I am the deadliest animal on earth
setting toxins adrift in his blood
If I am the dead drawing his spirit into our remains
If I am the startled security guard
and the bullet freeing the blood sequestered in his flesh
If I am the blood
If I am the flesh
If I am not the reflection in the mirror
If I am the wolf-blood moon howling back at the many reflections
of what I am
If I am your swagger walking down the street
or a tinfoil wind flashing the multiple images of what we are
If I am the psalm and you are the song
If I am the force field and you are the force
If we are the forest the animals dream
Birds
Just outside my window
the tree draws the scrub jay
into its interior
absorbs it
Other animals wander inside
a beast we’ve yet to imagine
The streetcar eases in
afloat on its insistent whine
The small girl across from me
lifts her hand
weaves an inscription across the air
an infinity symbol an ampersand
or proof-reader’s delete
A dark tide moves across the earth
shape shifting elusive
A mud hen’s shadow
among the reeds
An imagined gunshot’s
transparency
The Air We Breathe
In a city of many temples
birds begin to fall from the sky
birds whose radiant colors you take
to paint the landscape
of another world into being
a sea cliff dropping from the stone ruins
the temples become
the cliff’s sheer face pockmarked
with a multitude of birds’ nests
their fallen plumage an intricate pattern
at the base of the cliff
as the painting’s white spaces
emerge as patches of snow
among the trees above the sea
and on their needled branches
above the cliff we now descend
past the nesting birds
to the crescent beach
and on the white sand we turn
to gaze at the sea
as shades of yellow and green
sweep across its surface
Spin City
You’re here and everywhere
seawater in my blood
in the tropics of my throat
a humming bird’s inaudible song
sung for another
the spinning city
its dense air and urban light
a seamless cage
containing us
that cosmic wash of stars
we cannot see
una cosa hermosa
and terrifying you said
your chain of small blue beads
flashing in the sun
around your neck
an engine’s hum
deep in a ship
that fills us with sleep and bears us through the night
Author Bio:
Patrick Cahill’s collection, The Machinery of Sleep, came out in 2020 from Sixteen Rivers Press, and another book, If We Are the Forest the Animals Dream, also from Sixteen Rivers, is due out in the spring of 2025. He cofounded the former literary and arts journal, Ambush Review, and was a contributing editor for the Sonoma County anthology, Digging Our Poetic Roots. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Into the Void, great weather for MEDIA, VOLT, Permafrost, Hole in the Head, Club Plum, Dog Throat Journal, and SurVision.
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