Jar

Unscrewed by
the others rising a
necessary sky
give under—

this shore of fragrant
prayer. There's no sleep here
no politic to keep hope
in a jar, like a jar
buried in heaps of Idaho
burned then years

later a child finds the cracked shell,
the jar as an egg
deserted, necessarily

a bird must be,
a bird must be a
kind of door left ajar



A poem called "The Cruelties,"
by George Oppen

This form of a woman I don't question, I keep
hope in she, that will

She comes a paradise green as the
O ending Idaho, the was that greened

the tree, that house of
was is everything—Should I wait in her, hurt
she bleeds many through she as I
shore every through my thing,
and I waste in, taste in her an away—

What bird alights its own wing?


These cruelties I know that seam
the hem of be: an Idaho low, as foghorn's moan so
feminine the skin of sky, thick
with bird opaque in feathered flutter

The sky's a you to ocean's I
where feet skim a bird seems

a missing wing, is she
unmending of the interinanimate sheet
she, coming uncovered til gone, she's undone



Idaho

Stray hairs in Idaho
whip the wind leaving through window
as autumn

leaves falling from Idaho               
to space no longer claused
in roots, what was I

in Idaho waiting for
the remarkable—This         "Movement of no import
                       Not encountering you"
marks Idaho near
as love's breath smudged in mirror, an ear
to unpresuppose tongue.
 

Joseph Bradshaw is the author of The Way Birds Become (Weather Press, forthcoming 2007). His poems have appeared most recently in DIAGRAM, Kulture Vulture, Mustachioed, and The Pedestal; and are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, the tiny, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel-2nd Floor. He is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.