2 Poems

By Eric Cline

Strange / Heron

There were crabs in the trees. This equilibrium
of water and land, liquid and solid, surface
and the adornment of protrusion had bubbled
over, rendering glossy both the glass and my
untrained eye. Things grew as they were want to do: strange
things, roots traversing routes longer than the tower
to heaven. The water was dark, the fronds softer

than the orbs upon them. In the morn the crofter
tills bark with nail, leaf with nail. There is a dour
look in the eye of the old heron. No phalange
is seen or known of. Remains of bridge not so high
above silk-mud hold me without will, care. Troubled
are those who harvest tenacity. Resurface!
There were crabs in the trees. Disequilibrium.

Vigil Strange I Kept
after Walt Whitman

since I don’t know when, your breath so interwoven
with mine, so cherished and sustaining within my
lungs, as if it were the same air passed from your lips
into mine before my ever learning your name,
perhaps at sixteen, not so much younger indeed
than those boys you led by hand away from Death, nor
those you gave to her by hand, swaddled while crossing

in lullabies, those as such your words, embossing
themselves upon my skin, saw the tender need for
within this boy who, though so your junior, would knead
your back without your asking, his eyes filled with same
hunger as those you peered back into, his two hips
like stalks of grass for you to wade through under sky
and its moon, by light and not-light, his legs cloven

Eric Cline is a poet. His chapbooks include UFO (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), and The Temporary (forthcoming in 2025 from Glass Lyre Press). More info can be found at https://ericclinepoet.neocities.org/