Allan Peterson
Unnoticed
Write to remember
how packed this instant
Read to relive
the creeper wrapping yams
feathers after
bathing refluffing
into place
things so small within
them they are unnoticed
but together weigh
more than Mercury
The poem like the
symphony that disappears
once delivered like
the shirts in my closet
of worm silk and
patterns that slip quietly
from their skeleton hangers to the
floor
The Future
Scapulae tell it the jumbled dice
bones
of the foot and
hand
even the saddleback
worm tells winter
even Christina from
the Weather Channel
backdropped by clouds
while outside straws
and matchsticks are cast
Still these
predictions are easier
than retelling the
past where even the list
of the missing is missing
Locale
In the garden a
wire rabbit holds a flower
like a howl
Inside roosters
pierced by napkins are normal
for the table top
Nothing foreign
like the
but common like the
hedge of hornbeam
its foliated maze
under which a snake is
flemished in the simplest
of labyrinths
tensed and ready in the
comfort of wet muscle
Missed
The fig came and
went with the children
Already it is
twenty years
And the pine is
five times above them
The missing are
missed
The
I-beams
under the house next door
are shinbones so the
whole
can be lifted and
removed like memories
leaves reexplaining last year
by this one till we
get it like wishbones wings
aromas of the lake’s
small Johnson’s
The Whisper
I know that sound Its is the wind
whistling
and I know why
It is admiration
for all the candles blown out
on the cake in
for the people
making intimate breezes
from lungs like winds
the sound of flying
heard in each breath
mentioning the red-tail
and of them the
smallest the most profound:
the whisper
that says when I love
you I change my name