Two Poems

 

  by Sean Patrick Hill

 

 

 

 

Smoke

 

      after Lucretius

 

Smoking votive.  this moon shadow-saddled.  ash of roses.  claret coat hung on a nail.  Saturn, Regulus rising.  over playing fields.  killdeer.  this plaintive cry.  flaring under Aldebaran.  naked wavering.  O brief candle.  jar of smoke. 

 

 

 

 

Things That Can Go Wrong on a Train to Madrid

 

To understand you must believe in a world mapped with impossible roads.  A Spaniard in a shirt the color of an unripe lemon that reads, You never run out.  Clouds dragging their wedding trains.  He shifts in his seat: You never run out of things.  Everything in Spain was under construction that summer.  I couldn’t stop thinking that if everything is in need of repairing it can only be a sign that everything is going to pieces.  Olive oil mills like cows starving in the distance.  You could almost get away with anything here.  The Spaniard stands as we approach the station, You never run out of things that can go wrong. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean Patrick Hill has received residencies from Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, In Posse Review, RealPoetik and New York Quarterly.  He blogs for Fringe Magazine.