Ed Skoog
Soldier’s Joy

Kitchen light flickers awake

white sink, crumb trails
shuts off again,
fridge hum stopping.

in dreams,
his hair brushed back,
thin at the end,
calling to his sisters
like they’ve won joy.
mother too,
herringbone drawn tight
against the wind,
between towns and factories—
sky a lamp

let it blow away,
worry lift off,
caught in a tree.

a blessing in it, too?

all ends, what will

my mind
like a translator sent packing—

nothing for days,
a song the piano’s forgotten
rescue yourself,
your own hands, thick with rope,
binding to the mast.

the faces drop their masks
like laundry—

red bricks,
roots raising them like stubborn teeth,
led me away

The stick that beat me is already new shoots.
dirt I swallow becomes ink

backing the car out of the driveway,
neck craned over lily-of-the-valley, spirea.
So much flat at the end—gurney, slab,
the horizon,

foxes burrow under the barn
scratching limestone

What you eat doesn’t know you.

Sunbreak over ox back.
Hedgeroots draw the same
water that pools where farmhouse
lights burn bodies into sleep.
The tangle gives the sheriff
a cane to beat a family from
its tenancy, from thoughts
their beds had made, door
propped open by a bucket.
Evening’s inhuman season
leans brutal into sky each swallow
swallows its too-short song.

solitude
invented the predator
I had to
invent such need.
kiss the rich jail of its mouth
passages of its hymns

midnight teeth I
press back for

draw the eye, glint, rustle, shine the rejected calendar of the sea

The tail of a

mouse Destroyer
in the strait,

misnavigate

A street in a city that never arrives.
quieter now
as I think we both know
who knows how far
not love, just fog

Dawn’s thin line on the river’s edge.

the nail
pulling up by gradual
degree its fastening

midday shadow
pass across its flame
an open palm

I get up, swallow the worst
of what I’ve done
from a green glass.

The glass on the counter sits
heavier than a clock counting backward,

under all this, a fault
unspoken
through bedrock’s
slow gather, through me

Ed Skoog is the author of four books of poems, most recently Travelers Leaving for the City (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). He lives in Portland, Oregon.