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The Elephants

Four Poems

Mark Harris

Shipyard
(after Richard Serra)


Memory, a hollow hull
serpentine

secrets laid bare to
weather, ways

through a metal maze
exposed

no scratched into
rust the rain refreshes

patter, pater, pattern
curve of sky and

a far-off hammer
sparrowsong amplified

heat rising
one limp condom

cocoon
in the gap of a steel seam


Supermassive


For the first time, we saw
--through the telescope’s eye

mirror to mirror, cone
to cone, the focal plane--

something leave a black hole,
flare-born

a bright corona fallen
unto that placeless place

gathered inward, and then
launched upward, like a jet


whatever it was, unseeable
source of light

might have been a memory
traveling backward


Recollection


In the white gravel
yard of the funeral home
a century plant
and there, waiting for us – us
stopped short by the lobby glass


Mt St Victoire
(after Cézanne)

A blue line, broken
where the ridge was

isn’t, errant edge
against the sky

no victory
but in wind and rain

to know – feel –
ourselves fugitive

the mountain holds

Mark Harris lives in Princeton, NJ. The poems presented here are part of a book-length manuscript in progress. Related work has appeared in NOON: journal of the short poem, ONandOnScreen and Shearsman. He is proprietor of Ornithopter Press, a small publisher of chapbooks by contemporary poets.

This originally appeared on June 18, 2017