Imogen Cassels: Two Poems

Jude

after correction, after love’s longer

than the way, after wind moving

the arboretum, we spoke beautifully

about our joint condition:

the resigned bliss of a resigned surface.

The long left of me there, under the serious

trees. Blue as a pigeon, or next year’s boat

that carries, but never holds.

We are all just grafting for what we want;

it is so easy to lose everything. So on.

I swear there have been saints made for less.

Smoke white and my happy body; the stone’s scald,

hot, rough and even. Or rare now, the dream

of moving slipshod into the new life,

tender still and seeking

utterly without geography,

hardly at all. As if.

Spring’s deep drift this.

Smoke white

Kittiwake through Eden co-wrest false:

still care of suede, salt blowing water

through a bruise.

I had been meaning to;

somewhere where I am not til

almost where I am, toward the cross.

All this by grace unhooked itself

and dropped towards a trace of distance:

the north ghost of your breathing,

at-rest consequence. Coral wise,

the seaish quality of the say wounded,

shoulder, isolate. The now known

snow clouds, and slight. My dreams

had spanned an unlit situation

for everything: the dead, the earlier rain.

Imogen Cassels is the author of Chesapeake, VOSS​, sonnets, Arcades, and other ephemera. She's also written essays about surrealism, Dylan Thomas, B.S. Johnson, grief, and translation.