David Filer: Two Poems

On Lines by Bin Ramke | From Puget Island

On Lines by Bin Ramke

        Shostakovich and Kubatsky at Archangel

The sun is close enough to touch. Reach out.
Any source of light is close enough to touch.
Reach out. Where fingers, palm, soft forearm glow,
The sun touches and is touched. Now, reach

Toward these words. They are light. White and black,
The difference between light taken away,
Light taken into the word, light flashed back
By the surrounding page. It is how we say

What the heart would say, mute in its dark capsule.
Reach out. Wrist, temple, corded neck: touch the force
The difference between systole and diastole,
The life code squeezed out from its warm source.

The heart is close enough to touch. It glows
Like words, like a distant pulsing sun. Reach out.

From Puget Island

That quality of light, looking southwest
Across the dike road, the long field planted
In pulp cottonwoods, down to the layers
Of alder and fir that cumulate and mass
In the perspective, as if there were forest
As the eyes narrow, instead of space.
Dark overhead now—the thick moisture drawn
Up river by inland thermals—but farther out
Lightening to gray, silver, then more white
Than a sky can be, the trees silhouetted
Against the glare. Meaning the sun still shines
On the Oregon Channel—the island, this side
Only, perhaps, caught under the darkness.
Giving us a choice which way to go from here.

Poet's Biography:

David Filer has a degree in English Literature from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a law degree from the University of Oregon. He is an attorney in Portland Oregon. His poems have appeared recently in Zyzzyva, Slant, Legal Studies Forum, Small Brushes, Red River Review, James River Poetry Review, and Gumball Poetry.