Two Poems

Joshua Cohen

The Verities

Near dusk retreating color leads the eye
from cloud to cloud, those bright pocked rinds
like orange peel beneath a growth
of mold, their penicillin glow
a false cure fading as the last
lucidities of day resolve to night.

The sun-clogged scrim of afternoon
is now a dim and porous veil,
this blue a deeper shade of truth
backlit with lesser bulbs. No telling, though,
which are the living rays and which 
the residue of long-spent suns.

From heavens of so much dark fact
any brilliant lie will do: brave dot
of a meteoric jet, the borrowed 
sheen on a lackluster moon, fool’s gold
of planets glimpsed in evening’s river bed
shining for all the world like stars.

The Wreck

The boat is washed 
and washed to bone.

The timbered curves
describe a skiff

more wind than wood,
the hull a safe

whose lock the sea
has learned to pick.

A probing surf
flings sheets of foam

across the keel
and then retreats,

backsliding whole,
leaving its salt.

The sting of brine
dissolves the thing

that will not break.
Only the sand,

its giving grain,
can smooth the waves,

knows how to wrest
from crashing fists

the long caress.
How can we learn

not to resist?
Whatever clings

to form brings pain,
the stubborn ache

in a shifting world
of holding shape.