Darkly of entrails and ink an evening rain erupts
and the day is buried in night.
Cold crescent and the true dark,
and the untrue. Salt
in the meat, in the cabbage. Salt in the bread.
News from the city, pearlescent horrors, gumdrop vomit.
North is never north enough: another night now
with my unlucky self, my flightless
and undeceived, my knelt at the trough, my faint and retching.
Earlier, under the brightest of the sun I saw a bird
floating on the shallows of the lake,
pulling up leaf after black leaf
and swallowing. Now I cannot
see the lake, I cannot see
the horses, I cannot
see anything
but the electric light of a town fed
on the feeders on blackness: the pickerel
pulled and rising from the foliate towers,
through those brief apertures of leaf and sun.
How quickly they still
and die with eyes that see nothing and, seeing nothing,
are not eyes. My mother
sits in her chair
like a jar of her younger selves. Bitter things
last us through the winter.
A Late Harvest of Apples
David Troupes has published two full collections of poetry, Parsimony (2009) and The Simple Men (2012), and his work has appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, South Carolina Review, Northern New England Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. When he’s not writing poems he’s drawing comics – see http://www.buttercupfestival.com.