4 Poems by Derek Thomas Dew

by Derek Thomas Dew

Robbery

The solitude is knowing together we can walk

through every garden arch that is aimed our direction.

The crooked square houses accentuate the hill,

extend it upward a little bit beyond itself.

It is the maybe that gets us through.

We will be the in-between animals.

The fish with feet, the flightless birds

whose eyes never stray from the lock

but who the houses seem to perpetually trust

while from door to door, their doors are removed.

Lunch Break

The eye that chooses

an outfit in the morning

and with drooping lid

watches the clock at work

can almost see the lover

climbing the stairs

just about noon;

the same hand

that applied makeup before work

now swings the car into the spot

home in a lunch break rush

and does the unbuttoning,

which internalizes it in the other

as a sylph twice born,

navigating both the body

and the city with an outer life

entirely unknowable

except as a stage play

which it enacts in the shadow

of its true form

and behind which

all we’re capable of

circles, un-aimed,

unfulfilled.

Nation

There is a little chair

built way over there

that passes through here

splintering into pieces

before anyone can sit,

and in becoming silence,

it spreads like a denial

focusing beyond itself,

rushing right through us

like a secret, and so we walk

to the window, we look out

over the tin roofs at desert’s edge

to the battleships on the water.

Between Afterlives

If the increments of greed

were ever uniform, the surface

of the moon must have seemed

nearly at hand. But as for now,

the doctors have given up,

and the woman is left to stare

at the spittle drying on the chin

of the patient she had dared to hope

would survive. No good anymore

for inevitability to be called intent.

Returning home through moonlit woods,

the woman wonders, does every branch

splitting the light mean its own shadow?

Does every shadow draw from the same shade?