Poetry
Mark Anthony Burke’s book of poetry, Birds and the Trick of Time, was published this
year by Circling Rivers Press and has been described by reviewers in the following way:
“These are marvelous poems of a life lived on the edge of the wild..”
and as having “ Clean language that relies on the natural image
to trace out a thin narrative thread and carry the deep feeling within.”
Birds and the Trick of Time can be purchased here.
Birds and the Trick of Time
sings of the fortitude passed through generations and through living on the fringes, through loving and endings, and the pauses that fall between people. They sing, too, of the natural world and its wisdom. A few poems dare touch on the trick of time.
— Joseph Millar, author of Shine
“These are the marvelous poems of a life lived on the edge of the wild, homestead poems among the harsh beauties of the far North. Clean language that relies on the natural image to trace out a thin narrative thread and carry the deep feeling within. A mother spinning yarn from the long wool of the sheep’s belly, dyed with burdock and beet-skin. The chapped hands of working class youth; night shift at a slaughterhouse, hustling the lumber mill’s green chain. I admire their spare lines and Stoic outlook, reminiscent of Gary Snyder or early John Haines.”
Birds and the Trick of Time here
Here's a few poems:
INVENTING GOD
Who spoke first to the sky,
conjured a name
for the lord of light?
Was she in the mountains
when clouds came so low
she heard voices,
dreamed she could walk
through the mist into the other world?
Was it when she knelt
in a cave of stone needles
and begged for her baby’s breath
to stitch the light again?
Was it when a man lay
on his back in a meadow
floating a river of scents
and rose out of his skin
drifting the ocean of stars?
Or was it a day like today
when she walks down
the stone steps
with the last of her bags,
the little dog dancing beside her?
Copyright Mark Anthony Burke
SYCAMORE AVENUE
climbed up on the roof, watched
the evening fall into darkness
around Pico and La Brea.
Gone to find work, I stayed
on the top floor of a fifties duplex,
looked for the signs in the sky
that helped to guide me.
At night, I shaped
wire-mesh forms of wolves,
statues of women, coated them
in paper-mache, the room
crowded with goddess statues,
animals, half-covered mesh frames,
bodies balanced upright, skin drying.
Thursday nights before garbage day,
I listened for the voices
that floated up from the street
mixing with the bone rattle
of dead palm branches in the wind.
Silhouettes combed the walkways
between apartment buildings,
the boy lifted dumpster lids,
the girl picked from the sidewalk bins,
whistled if they found anything.
The woman pushed a shopping cart,
carried what they took, scavengers
combing Sycamore Avenue.
I wanted to walk with them,
move through the darkness, talk.
Nights when the groan
of police helicopters woke me,
searchlights scraping the alleys,
I swam back through
a scatter of dreams,
gusts of a song about a river
blowing through the air,
went back into the front room,
talked to the bodies as they dried
leaning against each other.
Copyright Mark Anthony Burke
CAME AS RAVENS
Cloaks black as widows
they strut the deck railing,
peer in the windows, leap away,
their stream of shadows
flowing across the ferns and rocks.
They peck at the doors,
smear saliva on the windows
that dries to a chalky cuneiform.
When I was small, she’d kneel beside me,
coach the story I couldn’t believe.
But last night, kneeling on the kitchen floor
sweeping up pieces of glass,
dust rolled from under the stove
and her voice came into the air.
They glide from tree to tree,
compile their inventories,
drift over the swath of light
I cut in the crowds of hemlock,
a shrine I opened to the sun,
cast the ashes like seeds.
The winged mourners
scavenge offerings I lay on the boulders,
a lamb abandoned by her ewe,
stiffened hens tired of winter.
I sit on the porch and sift the past,
see her folded hands,
the raised tracks of skin,
burn scars from the bindery’s vinyl-sealer,
listen to their guttural calls,
the clicked code they chant
high in the dead fir by the lake.
Copyright Mark Anthony Burke
THE NECESSITY OF LYING
I’d line them up
before we’d go into a store,
spit on a tissue, wipe their faces,
straighten their hair, inspect.
They say now I was marking them.
I’ve watched how ravens raise theirs.
By fall, big enough to fly for an hour,
the parents lead the grown ones
away from the nest into the high forests.
They chortle and caw, follow to a new silence.
A book of myths and warnings
prescribes how fathers
should rub their newborns with salt.
The patriarchs dictated
that they must mark their children
to signify the covenant with god,
disinfect the corrupt tendencies
of the heart to ensure
their children would be truthful.
But it’s no guarantee.
Though you believe they never will,
when they lie to you the first time,
you ache as though you’ve been cut,
and think you will never
close such a wound.
But you try again, reconstruct
the lesson of forgiveness.
You think for days
that it is a fault of your making.
But the lies are critical,
it is the way we learn to forgive,
the way we learn
that our eyes give us away.
Copyright Mark Anthony Burke
WALK AWAY THE GHOSTS
opens the morning,
swifts darting past the window.
Sunlight streaks across the trees
and through the gaps in the blinds
where bright bands
stripe you as you sleep.
You are as lovely as
the violet jewels of jacaranda
and still I am up and gone.
The old men tap
two fingers over their hearts
and nod a prayer of greeting
when they pass me
climbing the path to the temple.
They must know that I’m afraid
you will tire of my moody ways,
the hours of doubt and distance.
I have no medicine but to walk
and argue with the voices
until they melt into the light.
When I come back, please
come and we’ll drink the red tea,
walk the gardens where the storks
have built their nests on poles,
watch the curved bone of moon
rise into the evening sky.
