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This page is very much in-progress.
 For Eternity stood wide apart,
As the stars are apart from the earth.
William Blake
Photo by Sara Hanif
Otter
I shine like a hairless fish, or a tongue, but this is my pelt, enclosing a secret's cunning-- winters in dark surf have given me the silhouette of a wave rising or just-spent, and the cold ocean utters me like a whisper. The sand-shark cannot catch me. The rip-fanged moray I leave behind, and your gaze, too, is always tardy as you call
to your companions, aim the camera, steady the binoculars for another look. In my better-than-hands the stone-shelled mollusc is a morsel, and I pluck the flashing sand-dab from her fathoms. I'm that name you can't remember, the language you forgot, the hope you knew would never come, tide departing to return.
Otter first appeared in Commonweal Magazine
 Friendship is prayer. Photo: Sara Hanif.
Detail art by Frank Jones from The Cities We Will Never See, my collection of poems from this and parallel worlds.
Glass Eye
We lived in the cottage by the river where it stood like milk with the smell of town. Mornings were the frying of smelt, the little knives with eyes,
and my aunt and my mother and my sisters chattered, buttering toast. There were butterflies in the wallpaper and my uncle would join us.
He had lost it when a rifle burst. Snipers had called to him from high trees.
He would descend with his tie and vest and cufflinks, smelling of aftershave and smiling, looking at us with both eyes.
This poem appears in By Evening, winner of the Owl Creek book award, copyright © 1992 Michael Cadnum
Glasauge
Wir lebten am Fluss im Häuschen,
darauf der Geruch der Stadt wie
abgestandene Milch. Morgende
mit gebratenen Stinten,
die kleinen Messer mit Rost,
und meine Tante und meine Mutter und
meine Schwestern
schwätzten, schmierten Brote.
Es gab Schmetterlinge auf der Tapete,
und dann kam mein Onkel hinzu.
Durch eine Gewehrsalve
hatte er es verloren. Heckenschützen
hatten aus Baumwipfeln auf ihn gezielt.
Er kam herunter mit
Krawatte, Weste und Manschettenknöpfen,
mit dem Geruch von Rasierwasser und lächelnd
schaute er uns mit beiden Augen an.
Translation of Glass Eye into German by Elke of Celle
 Let me be the colors you see when you close your eyes. Photo: Sara Hanif  Night does not end, but it does depart. Photo: Sara Hanif.  Let us be true says no living thing but one human to another.
Photo: Sara Hanif Frankie & Johnny
Lick the truth like a
smoke, light sleeper,
run like
mercury down
cracks in hours, quick
as the first man to
touch an honest woman.
Bad to the teeth you
shoot cuffs on the
clean eternal street,
run like gun oil down the
leathery earth while
all these nights in the
back streets
Frankie cries
Michael Cadnum
copyright © 1976, 2018 Michael Cadnum
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