Poetry
C. John Graham
Thanks to the journals where versions of these poems first appeared.
“CONSPIRE” MEANS TO BREATHE TOGETHER
A brick here, a girder there, and soon,
high-rises trickle light
like constellations decrypted
among the broken clouds.
An ocean idles at the end
of the habited earth. Gravity-leavened,
it rises while you’re sleeping; it loves
the crinkled moon. Tonight
you’ll body yourself upstairs.
A speck of space dust flares
and plummets, its evanescent
signature
congealing in the evening air.
The nictating city
slumbers in its wetland bed, a billion
synapses sending each minute
uneasy missives
to an ambivalent heaven.
Girded in a cirrus halo, the moon
commandeers your clerestory, her iridescence
devouring every brilliant
thing in sight. Eating until she’s
filled with light.
Halcyone Literary Review October 2020
NIGHT SKY
You must be your own absence with fifty percent deity.
Dana Levin
Any knothole will fit a planet
or a star. But one wanders;
one’s relativistic. And I wonder: what portends
when a sizzling meteor
whips up a disappearing act? When lightning
strikes the same steeple twice? Starry bodies
dissolve into darkness all the time. At
light velocity, the soul’s trajectory is a pebble
tossed down a gopher hole. If I’m
small, will anyone notice me? How can
I be sure, now that lone
means more than together?
New Mexico Poetry Review October 2008
NEXUS
This is what we know so far: satellites pass
overhead each hour, broadcasting their dustings
of doubt; planet or not, Pluto cleaves a neat
inclination each twenty-five decades; mad-hatted
Saturn makes rings of aimless collisions; and the sun
can make havoc of our transmitted fictions.
Volitionless bodies forever furrow space and time.
Treading a lunar-illuminated path between my
white stucco portico and forty acres in total darkness,
I wonder how one abides without the other. Seldom
synchronous, these queries flare and extinguish
under an abyss of constellated sky. Heaven
is a temple in the days we long to go home;
Earth is a classroom for the rest.
Appeared as a broadside for the Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival in Carbondale, CO March 2013
THE MOUNTAINS ARE ON FIRE, AND THE PEOPLE ARE AFRAID
Throwing a good-bye kiss, he pauses on the lower
stair landing. Spring is early this year—are you
going to hang out the hummingbird feeders?
*
She weeds the flagstone walk, prunes a newly
planted rose. Seeding lettuce in wet dun beds, she whispers,
Bare just one leaf to the moon.
*
Leveling at thirty-one thousand feet, he streaks
through a lead-pencil sky. Over blackened
canyons, the contrails swirl like snow.
*
Four hours of Discovery Channel and she wonders:
Why aren’t the redwoods impervious to fire? How does a humpback
echolocate? How does he come
*
clean out of the water? Each morning
she makes ritual
of pinching the coleus buds.
Glint Literary Journal Dec. 2022
NEEDLE
A body mostly water: water in
the bones, the nerves, the straining
muscle, heart, brain.
*
Water bends a straw
by bending light. This body
one empty straw, with
*
a portal between the eyes, a phantom
hatchway above the skull.
The dim glimmer
*
of deskbound lamplight perishes in interstellar shimmer.
Nebulae elastic
*
arc the black vacuum, a factory
of stars. Be
the needle
on the hanging
thread.
The Inflectionist October 2022
CLOUD CHAMBER
particles leave traces in fog
in a blue-veined alabaster vestibule
prayers evaporate Mary
may abide but
the data paint your face
pretty particles in vapor
lay tracks from above
I open my mouth
and eat the clouds
to forget how
you taste
Painted Bride Quarterly October 2023
SHOOTING RABBITS
It’s the day for shooting rabbits. I can’t imagine
why it’s been so long. Neither can anyone else. My business
is the new business; the old business
was finished long ago. Now some are getting
ready to shoot; some are already
shooting. No one has given us
the answer sheet; no one
has an answer. I dream of shooting
the long-range missile in the silo. This counts
as a big rabbit.
The Laurel Review Fall 2010
DEPARTURE CLEARANCE
A rain-blackened branch
creaks in the breeze.
Leaf clutter rustles under
pendulum steps.
How many times
can a limb shadow sever
the silver string of recollection?
Mottled daylight plays
among the trees. Look—
it stays a while on you.
Taos Journal of Poetry and Art July 2017
SPACE
It’s ten p.m. when you step into the study and stumble
through the two-year-old’s debris field. Your spouse
rattles a snore from the sofa, oblivious to the nova
dusty little star cluster, will you
never coalesce?
at her feet, while the dog winds himself
silly and sighs in a corner, declining
your entreaties to reacquaint.
arm of the spiral, neighborhood
of anarchy
Tomorrow he’ll delight in desiccated kibble, yellow
nebulae mottling rectangular lawns, and the coded odors
of a regiment of ticking parking meters. An orderly
the vacuum roils
with effervescing particles
universe, like the days when the Ring Nebula
was just a ring. Now it’s a supernova, gas and dust
blown everywhere, as epithets still fly
the probability of collision
is never zero
over Pluto’s demise. Space pablum spatters
Hubble’s double ears. An unplumbable hole
inhales a nursery of stars. Gravity waves rumble
event horizons
leak undecipherable information
the guts of the planet, triggering another
strike-slip fault. Like a promise that only holds itself,
you’re made of mostly empty space. Without an explicable
time spools
into a singularity
whim in your head, you retrieve
from the carpet a faded blue bead
while radio telescopes in the desert
gravitational lenses
magnify the explosion
intercept signals from
a red-shifted dim double star
announcing its self-annihilation.
Blue Mesa Review #7, fall 1995
CUMULONIMBUS
Sprouting from hillside bristle, it overtops
the docile willows not a mile past
this quivering pane of glass.
Songbirds retreat to eaves and copses. Scattershot amulets
ricochet across vaporous parking lots. The unctuous understory
hunkers over not-yet-sodden lawns
and splits
the viscous quiet with light, its
gravelly staccato
summoning hand to heart in the anarchy. The obedient
cedars are not safe. The wavering
alfalfa is not safe.
Capillatus, pilleus, incus mammatus.
Fractus scud, rain heap, supercell squall. Fickle
black lurking, horizon to horizon, grasses
flat
and rooted, still
they are rooted.
New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023