Musing

Jonathan Locke Hart's poetry has appeared inmany prestigious literary journals, and translations of his poems havebeen published in Estonian, French, and Greek. He teaches at theUniversity of Alberta, and his recent books include DreamChina, Dream Salvage, and Dreamwork.

• Index of First LinesA certain happiness exists despite 86A Romanesque bridge joins one hill 65All from the stars the shards fell, light condensed 8And yet the morning light held you, the cuts 47Another poet scoffed when I said 72Breath, too, can plummet, magic rougher 14Daughter, you are more delicate 18Dusk falls over a land cut and crossed 66Flint, outcrop, overhang: I made my way 54For him, there is only one poet: his wife 93Freezing to death is not an act of love 52Girders and glass roofs extend at round 77Her pale hair stumbled in the wood, and he rode 33How to keep the deep fluster and rush 108I am not certain: je ne suis pas sûr 56I have a whole cache I will oneday 62I have washed too many I have watched 38If joy could screeve from lung and marrow 23Impostors shape fictions of marrow and soul 16In your eyes along the streets can I see 64It is not as if the sun andI 90It would be as the wind, but some force 49It's not custom to begin with the couplet 40Just when it seems she will sing deport 45Keel, mast, sail in wind, sea, sky shake and bend 32Love is a Stonehenge, virtual to some 100Made of systems? Love and justice have lost out 74My heart is even lonelier than my face 80Nostalgia and utopia, past and future 68On an outcrop in Central Park, we talk 76On the brink of simile I faced 98Our whatever is an asymptote and not 89Pain like bread breaks and tears, and in France 88Palm trees came to France in 1864 51Remember our mothers who bore us 83Ropes, planks, cups, lines, buckets, tiles, fieldstones 87Roses are more gorgeous than us: we are as birds 82Silent devotion at first light, wind 59So much depends on the glibness of words, 55So the wind was on your sleeve: you asked me 10Something rebarbative lives in this life 94Son, you were allergic to filberts then 17Taboo in the stem of my skull, the danger 11The absence of your breath heats my marrow 42The angles of the moon over, through those trees 41The aspersion she cast cuts deep: thetimes 15The barges slip along the Seine, the wind has died 109The boughs lay withered beyond the brow 1The cars on the rail line are stacked up 71The closer to the ground, the morefictional 58The clouds lie over the land near Avignon 70The country is not pastoral: it was 67The cusp of the dark falls on Central Park 13The dead stars rise over the ridge, the garden 79The dog beyond the gate barked, as if 22The embarrassment of words abandonsus 43The fen stretches out like prairie, thecanals 6The garden in the ruined abbey brims 4The Georgian calms the world about, hills slant 102The hawthorn trembles in rain and ice 44The hills are burial mounds: the oaks drape 101The nuclear power plants smoke over the land 69The renitency of the will opposes all 26The scree on the beach was lost in your breath 25The sea scrubs the rock, the clouds on the cape 27The season of our wooing, a stillness now 84The shadows of the evening still across 92The sparrow on the trough is world enough 3The speculation of music has 103The tongue is spare: the wind lifts on the dirt road 20The turquoise water is not faked on a postcard 28The warehouses, spills, heaps, strews, broken waste 75The way trains move, poetry moves 61The white cliffs above Cassis 91The wind was slapping the water, and the surf 105The winds rise over the plain outside Paris 35The windows of the moon have cast 29The winter of our breath was the blue 9There was a window on the stars, the cusp 31There was jazz playing in a room away 34There were stones there were knives 39There's something about a train that islike 97These eyes, joints, gums ache with an age 95They married looking out to sea, the west 7They were quartering us in these streets 30This harvest is the sap that moves in us 21This night, like the vanity of death 50Those catacombs, stacked with skulls and bones 60Through the threshold the pollen draws, thelight 46Till we fled Calais these twoterrains 36Vexation burned when the sun beat on the waves 19We rose from dust on a day not of our 104What is not said in the garden 2What of the furtive thief of love stealing 106When I was young the world was young: you know 48When Venus moved her headquarters, she sighed 57Who would hear me above the surf, the remains 78Why is it the poplar leaves turn in the sun 73Window night-frame time of the moon 37Winter has its verges, not a green snow 81World, breath, disinherited us,even 85You don't have to be Richard the Third 107You sang, black Madonna, your breasts more perfect 12You sculch my secret signs, as though I illude 24You see before you a man more ridiculous 63You watch the dying light after the star 96Your arms are not a trope, andhyperbole 53Your face was the chalk in thesehills 5Your heart is knapped flint, or is itmine? 99