Full Loaf by Jeremy Cook

Collage by Luis Garcia

40 pages, 2005

 

NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Our heads exploded through the hatches.
Ice-stars shattered the rigging.
In the long nights
the wind howled through the guts of the ship.
The groaning of timber
and rending of ice
told of damage too deep
for human hands.
Arguments became vicious:
the bone-demon chattered
through the lips of the living.
     

SILK BANNERS

Kimonos
ripped in the wind—
the sweet
tendrils.

Mouth moves
into another mouth.
A boat sails.

Pieces of different colored silk move
silently away.
       

BLACK DAWN

Blurred lights and a smudge of filthy town.
Morning traffic drags itself across the bridge.
Hills and heaps of stone, invisible;
the sky gasps out skeins of dirty rain,
and dawn flaps sadly across the river.
My coffee-gutted teeth are snarled with grit.
I wheel a chattering machine into the traffic
and roar like a madman in the wind.
Around me all faces are glazed —
I never knew that death
had made such a mess of things.
Today is the darkest day of the year.
     

"M"

Mind moves with the music.
The mind is a stone dropped in a well.
The sounds well up.
Where is the point?
Diamond hardness.
The starting point.

Miles and miles of sugarcane fields.
Sound of mildness
waving in wind.
Sun-washed, sea-washed, cloud-washed
Island.

A few drinks with friends
on the deck.
The ocean, boundless,
slowly waves goodbye.
And that's all.