(See Sketch Book) by Kevin Dwyer

My father could speak Cornish.
The grain on him as candle smoke,
knuckles covered with ash,
cooped in ‘til morning brim,
with a shock of wet heads.

A gale in the tuft unraveling in a cowl
like the corner of a handkerchief.
Red candle wax crisp and meshed over
with a lacework of needles like ice-pillars.

Are we his glass to look in?
The illusion looking across the wagon,
unable to lift our heads.

You may sometimes look down
but they do not know it:
my finger is selfmurder.

S inscape mixed of tree backwards,
drawing itself from the line of the keel.
What must it be to be someone else?

A field of hay is too warm.
The taste of clover or alum?
The sun is about that.

Though as far from one another
as we are from some of them,
there is wanting freedom here
and multiple coins to choose from.

Broken blots of snow in the dead.
A slow entasis strips porcelain maroon.
Rollers across the wind,
blown from the next snow,
each striking a greater saint,
charged like ropes and hills.
This is the real meaning of an artificial pot.

(Kevin Dwyer is a Masters student in English with a creative writing concentration.)