Poetry: Selections from Alexander Etheridge

One Life

Sunflowers and red clover

in shadows of

a permanent eclipse

A dark lake

and further out

an abandoned ocean

One figure

walks swiftly along black cliffs

the only one alive

in an unaccompanied world

Sounds of the shore

remind him of a prayer

from long ago

a single word

that guides him through his

hunger his

brief

and closing moment

Our First Night

As you sleep here in the forest,

your breathing

is a promise from one ocean

to another,

or Nirvana’s spindle

unthreading without a sound.

As you sleep, I feel stars

gathering high above us

as if to witness your

hushed and

delicate elegance.

I watch you

gently turn between dreams,

and for a moment

we live forever,

alone in the wild world,

free from the reaches

of time,

together with everything

pure and deathless—

We lie on the long grass

in the glow of aspens and elms,

in the center of night,

our minds quiet,

here again

at the start of our story.

My Unlight

I can see them now around me, shadows

begetting shadows—their dim appendages

multiplying, eating

light

in this once bright afternoon—Shadows

spreading like a grassfire, thickening their

sub-lumen, growing

shadow wings, taking flight

over the sun. It started down

within me, black cells

waking, doubling,

thinking—A shadow’s mind

wants only dark—dark in the

head, dark in the hills, dark over the soul

like a strange quilt. I think this

is what I always wanted—a shadowed mind

in a shadowed world.

Poetry as a Map

In twelve lines I’ll find my way back

though I stumble in the outskirts

on a plane of thorny stars and wolf tracks

The fourth line is a primitive map

The fifth is a kerosene lamp

and by its light I can sense

being quietly shepherded

The eighth is a promise

my only possession now

The way back is through grim frozen peaks

I was always ready

Now I take my leave

The Contradict

From shadow to shadow, then out

to the sky’s open nerve branches

of lightning . . .

It may not seem it,

but the waking world is

stranger than dreams.

From patient zero

to the threshing floor.

From Eden

to Los Alamos—

It’s mystery over mystery

and everything at once

surrounding us.

We feel this but can’t

explain it—As soon as we glimpse it,

we forget.

The question is

the answer. It’s silence

as a spoken word,

and silence

opening caves of the mind.

It’s vision and blindness

in the same eye, or motion

and arrest—

Along our way,

we get delicate shreds of

this treasure,

a road out of salvation

into the heart of the cosmos

where each atom is

electric,

like the backs of words,

connecting us at last to

everything, to the peace of the vast

and terrible sublime.

Journey

A poem is like a fingerprint,

each with its own

shape on the page.

A good poem gets away

from the meager hands

of a writer,

and forms itself.

It is purer than us,

quicker and wiser—It rises

out of rain and ocean,

and from echoing forests

of Xanadu—

It imprints itself

outside of time.

Even after the last of us

is gone, a poem keeps

breathing, living

free of us at last.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Ink Sac, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, God Said Fire, and, Snowfire and Home.