Jennifer Spector

MIGRATIONS
 
 
                     … nadie sabe dónde se ha perdido
                       ni a qué silencio entró.
                         (Nobody knows the place where he is lost
                          nor what silence he has entered) – Octavio Paz


  blade with me in low
           grasses, stay quiet     the pirate
  birds and cocoritos deep building rough nests
       pinwheel the trees

let us lay to ground   or
     island for weeks
                   to roost on dry cliffs

gliding colibríes, gavilanes, warm updrafts driving patterns
of sea and selvage as they whet the till
         pacific boundaries blurred
                                             their edgelands

dentations    cleaving
      trench of the body
                  something carried in




  follow me to the rough house, sleep near quiet water, trail our
carrion at the sound        swimming
              iguanas      headed to islands will walk
       across land
  clutches of thirty
share nests along mangroves and rivers
            even the crocodiles   emerge at night, stalking the swamp
  brakes




o the waterthrush sing                       few at a time
                                                                  over canopies of Malagueto, Jobo, Cecropia
                                 their mahogany song    a sea-going ship
      marked: all the warblers have shored here
       in highlands               in breeding
    dress      they soon depart


& the suicide tree      after a hundred years
                    finally matures
        then in april, clusters                brown flowers
              waits for the dry season     sheds leaves
  to the wind
      produces         dies

much like the wanderer
       in snow       whose every small egress
          first spades                        then flights the hollow






COEVAL


How far dark fruit plumping vine
Purples the holloway     saffron fields
Crêping in reave

How far in time we walk
Geese plundering tallow ground
Harvest loose     of fosse

Carr and cloudbow      the kyle’s runnel
Rowan surrender to brier
Nut unsplit       a bugle’s last
Lullaby toasting the belly liege

Carom, kalanji, argent skin
Amber       of bodies cadenced
By filament and fissure
Witched off same cloth

How far and fulgent
A later sun     seeking cover
Fields the swire with its flares

Copyright © Jennifer Spector 2016

---

Jennifer Spector is a writer from New York City, living and working in Panama. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Reliquiae, Fulcrum, Litmus, La Vague Journal, Tzak: a journal of poetry and poetics, Suelo vol 1 (arts & ecology chapbook), Promethean and elsewhere. Her lyric essays have been published on the "ship's log" for Performance Studies International #21- Fluid States. Recently, her series of 100 'flaschenpost' landscape poem-origami, created from maps of Panama from the 1950s, were included in Genesis Tree New York, artist Valerie Hird’s exhibited installation, comprised of 4,000 origami works from around the world. She is currently designing a site-specific collaboration with land artists to take place this year on Isla Gobernadora, Panama. jenniferspectorstudio.com