Seth Howard


HERE & ELSEWHERE

I watched birds lift to the tower shrouded in mist,
a cloud overhead left my mind reeling.
I watched the last
embers of the sun sink down,
a motion kept,
that late afternoon.
I asked if the bus had come, she said “No.”
A warm day for winter, & the feel of a Japanese town.
The music ran
through my fingers
as I wound
a spool of liquid from the sun.
The white moments we come to alone,
alive to the presence of being there, perched
the birds above the station
had lined the roof,
high astride an invisible sky.
I watched the sirens shriek through streets, it must
have been mid-December, I called
to the veil of
dawn I watched lift over
those closed gates, & made my way to the temple
that glimmered in the night
like a coin.



WOMAN OF THE MARSHES, DOOR OF MY SELF
After Robert Desnos

Door of my past that would hurl into waters these motions, of my stony flower quivering in the rain

Life opens, an orange in the light, to be rearranged on a shelf of sand
Her life a glassy surface she peers into
Whispers softly to the elms
Door of my oceans hidden in wells left leaning into reflections of a watery gleam, moments darken

An oaken heart, distilled into basins which pulse with an invisible hum

Door of my rivers snaking into horizons dark as glass, her past opens before me a motion I cannot
Know, footsteps glimmer in a room without walls
She gives herself to a searing rain

Door of my future which flows from my hands, a dark blade whistling through the maples of the sun




Seth Howard is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where he majored in English Literature. Lover of things Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Taiwanese, he has traveled extensively across East Asia. He enjoys reading Philosophy, translating contemporary Japanese poetry, and practicing Zen meditation. He currently resides in New London.
 
 
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