SEAN PATRICK HILL
Sean Patrick Hill has published three books. He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College,
and poems either in or coming out in The Equalizer, TYPO, Spork, and The Blueshift
Journal. He lives in Kentucky (USA) and is also a father. And he sometimes take photos.
These poems are from a manuscript titled Discountry, which was a finalist for publication
both for New Michigan Press and Black Ocean.
River Zero
The river
irons in the cold.
Night iron, locked reaches of sky,
locked cold, unbroken ice.
In its acre of song,
persistent leaf, black will come,
here blossom,
always sing the climate we weather.
An acre of clime, an ache of ground,
breach of air
surrounding inevitable, hovering a river
of lethal sky
the wren
zero like a song.
Emendation
Not too soon, few means as possible,
without.
That is
the vein of division, glimmering
land when we stood,
dock in mind, window in the horizon.
That men depend on men is holy, but.
Dreaming in sums,
standing paper trees in deserted banks,
driving us I declare
to bear distance,
to easy forgiving.
Plane Trees
Room of wind
survive the ghosts.
Invite and it will not
be gone.
In the entering that was here, when we came
we came down.
Twenty trees, the ancient house, orison
of the green of them, horizon a dream
to dream,
sound of shadows with wind in them,
ground, gentled
my age, pleased their shadows as I
be for this place
the sound in them.
If I Don't Lie
In truth,
the truth
vandalizes winter.
Summer sun, our kind of hope but
a shade in the earth.
Worms were keeping faith,
dead
or better men.
Poet,
dividends belong to rain,
to no truth be more honest than falling.
From her,
my sentence a song, an ark.
We speak until the world lies
open and
dark flowers
birds without measure.
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