The white concern of our sheet
I bought my wife an antique mirror—Blanched glass.
Crazing frame.
Imagine the tsar's parlor paneled in amber.
Gold foil, gouache. Fence of iron roses.
Merrill said,
poets choose the words they live by—Spindle, lathe.
Hammer, linen.
Ghost towns hung in the elms.
I remember weathered waterwheels,
fulcrums clogged with crushed birds.
My wife says, the flaws give it character.
Clangors of bells as trains leave the yard—
A band of horses in a canyon of thorns.
Sean Patrick Hill's poems are currently in Exquisite Corpse, elimae, Alba, diode, In Posse Review, Juked, Ditch, and The Corduroy Mtn, and are forthcoming in Willow Springs, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Apocryphal Text, and Quarter After Eight. He is a travel writer, husband, soon-to-be-father and teacher in Portland, Oregon. He graduated with an MA from Portland State University and has had residencies at Montana Artists Refuge, Fishtrap, and the Oregon State University Trillium Project.