An ever-changing selection of some of my poetry…

Artificial Intelligence by Gret Heffernan

In Laurel Canyon, she sliced open her finger with a bread knife, vomited at the sight of blood, and knew you were with her. ER was full of actors and junkies. She wondered about him. So, he took her speeding through the 2nd Street Tunnel. Blade Runner to prove a point. Night blur and the Bradbury Building, where he removed a Phillips from his shirt pocket and slowly tightened each of her screws. Because he had thought about where bolts would fit into her body, she let him. Reality exists inside the artificial, he’d say, meaning love. In bed, he liked to pretend to be Roy. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die, he’d say as he traced her. Months later, bits of you in the toilet. Little floating islands. Some worlds end and begin in the space of a thumbprint. A clot of seaweed. Moss. A human. You were wise not to stay. Not long after, he died high on his motorcycle. Strange how she cherishes what she’s incapable of holding. You’ll learn to live like this, should you come here. Secretly, she is a Terraformologist aboard a space station clicking through eons. Minor planets lit above pedestals in her laboratory. Inside each one, she encodes an image of you. Mountain clavicles. Succulent toes and lakes from your ear hole. Nostril geysers. Each moon, your eye. A seabed smooth as your neck. She leaves you messages in ice, from cracking rock, the gas hisses your name. A spine of desert. In the morning, before the sheep eat it away, she walks her dog through the fuzz of your cheek. Spread over the South Downs like a lost love letter.

Woodland

there is a timbre of voice 

that suggests what is there 

but not there / sounds of snow

all day walking through response 

of body of landscape, we preserve 

the unintended / then a clearing 

of self-held to light, your skin letter

held up, meaning gathered here 

in small clusters / something at dusk’s edge

what you hold, you hold blind

didactically glacial and slow 

the boroughs of us / calligraphic 

when viewed from above this

second tip traced in the soft fall of prehistory

there lives your one sentence / story

Yellow Barn

I know who you are now.

The you I address

My dark and forever, my essential context, the figure

Of my sick child, alone on the porchlight

As silent as listening. Now the sudden

Fizz of a moth in the zapper. Now the nightjars.

And the crescendoed depths of unseen animals

There’s the barn and the field of alfalfa

The gravel drive and the windbreak of pine

And the sky, the iron of any cage.

The stars, the cold gap of any dream.

The moon, the full empty of any hunger

The coyotes the paw scrape of any grief

And a rectangle of yellow, the flood

Light of devouring.

I waited for him

To step into this golden frame and speak

My name across his lips like a winter broken.

But he never came, he never wrote, he never spoke.

Instead, you did.