William Cordeiro
COSMOS
The only things we see
give out a light, eclipse it,
reflect or warp its glow
when we look upward
from this silent meadow
into the night. Wet planets,
an archipelago of fireflies,
blink overhead. A few clouds
drift. A moon’s dim circle,
nearly new—and newer
still, a manmade satellite
looms and flares before
it’s vanished. Every star
now skirls our blood. Love,
a small dust sifts our cavities.
Below us: rubble, sluff, and mire,
far silhouettes of woods,
the nearest village like a cast
of pearls. Above, such distances
stippled with icy scales which
twist inside the brine and slag
that floats a dragon atmosphere,
this haze of sleeping smoke.
We stare past so much dark
matter, microwave background,
ghost particles; meteorite-
pocked asteroids, the hair
of comets, a cold void light
from pulsars dead before
they’ve reached our eyes. Yet,
past the flight paths, scattered
nebulae and orbits, a few loose
sparks embellish us with life—
star-crossed, unasked-for fire.
FIELD OF VISION
I wish to sing this summer halfway gone,
but, listening,
I linger over every word
that drips its crumbling resin on my tongue.
Sun overflows a quiet through my bones;
one redwing blackbird swoops across the valley,
a distant mountain burning off like fog.
And when I see each thing as thing, not god,
the names inhabit my dark mouth more fully:
I almost taste the pine sap in the air—
a dark stain dapples from a weeping stone,
which just by looking at I might become
if toppled light could build by self-repair.
I wonder if the clouds need any courage
to spill their lavish image through the glare.
They’ve travelled overland to vanish clear
into my eye—at margins re-emerge
effusively as far penumbras zero
down long horizons for another dawn,
complex with surface, warped and flying from
our world… I, too, am numinous.
A blue jay
wings across sere grass. Now, zoom in and see
how each frail cinder in the sun dissolves.
Zoom out—the ravened edge of earth unravels.
Luminous,
worth saving:
leaf, bird, and gravel.
Will Cordeiro has recent work appearing or forthcoming in *Agni*, *Cimarron Review*, *The Cincinnati Review*, *Poet Lore, Radar Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal*, *The Threepenny Review*, and elsewhere. Will’s forthcoming collection *Trap Street* won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Will co-edits the small press Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.
© 2020
