Craig Erick Chaffin

To Kathleen, after Neruda

As the salmon seeks its mother gravel Through the lying ions of the sea, I seek you. Without your body my blankets are cold, The ground hard, my joints uneasy. Apart, I am a

Last Poem of my 45th Year

I thought of how a whale’s white ribs Could choke the sky’s blue neck, Massive vertebrae half-buried in sand, And how a keel cleaves the sea While the wind zephyrs canvas to swell And

A Time to Weep

I suppose you could call me heartless As a dull anvil clanking in a sodden barn, The damp wood too lazy to echo your pain; And your limbs twisted like great roots, Your hearts

Black granite stretches its harsh, tapering wings Up to pedestrian-level grass But sucks me down, here, at the intersection of names. I forgive, I must, though I wish something Could heal this wound in

The Obesion

I Before I grew this spacesuit I was trim. I saw it in a doctor’s report: “The subject is an athletic-appearing White male in no apparent distress.” I was thirty six. Now I wheeze

At the Aquarium of the Pacific

I saw a brilliant angelfish whose tail And fins shimmered yellow until it turned And silver spread like an undercoat of fur When stroked against the nap, across its scales. Black as caviar and

On the Anthropic Principle

Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy It is easy to forget the central axle Moving insensibly slow, still The silvery-white dispersion of stars Soothes randomly until we impose a pattern, Like the Magi,

Leaf Sermon

I have been spiritually poisoned By the unclean, in ignorance Blessed their springs. In consequence I withered And drifted down From green crown to brown humus, Thinned to a fishbone pattern Of cellulose threads.

Drug Trial

I Everyone has their own peculiar price, Not quantifiable in currency. When my hypodermic grazed your vein, You confessed yours. It was not exorbitant So I withheld the serum A moment longer before Pushing