Paul Ilechko
Stone Map
Stones are mapped with ink
on parchment a quiet tracery
of lines that freely flow
thickened
in places with brutalist crosshatchery
that tends towards a blackness
and in-between the stones is always
an unassuming smallness of life
easy to diminish in a world of signs
of markers that claim the historic
the game changing the ubiquitous
but never the destructive crawl of root
* * * * * * *
they’d left behind the war two hundred
years of it escaping by oar or fragment
of cloth that whips
in the violent wind
that scrapes the plunging surface of the sea
alive for now within this desperation
following the stone white map
to land in some kind of paradise
or else a cell their bodies inked with
permanence their papers now irrelevant
the knives strapped to their ankles
as they follow the marked out trail
always between the stones looking across
at roofs and towers a liquid environment
that mocks the dryness
of their routes
the dusty fragments of life that are lived
in ink dark crevices searching for a light.
Hawk Flight in Violet Snow
Imagine fresh snow whiteness
to infinity imagine it as canvas
where color might be spilled
a new art form crystallized out of
the stillness of molecules how cold
must it get before everything halts
your windows gaze upon the blankness
in your imagination a hawk might swoop
across the emptiness of field
a rabbit is torn its entrails scattered
like paint a blood feud between
the elements of dirt and wind
a poem is a painting where the gestures
are language the word that stands for
flight is mixed with the word that
means kill like blue merges into red
the same hawk tearing a purple slash
across the width of sky as the rabbit dies.
