“Flames and Dangling Wires”
The speaker begins on the way to a garbage dump or landfill. Smoke from incineration fires rise on one side all around there is that strange optical effect of wobbling vision. Shadowy figures who almost seem to be picking over actual dead bodies are instead attending to the refuse which is a testimony to how the present and future is dependent upon the castaways of the past.
“Twilight”
This is an impressionistic poem which posits a truth about twilight as a unique time of day, and supports the argument with evidence suggesting that the dramatic confrontation between light and dark is beyond Shakespeare’s pen and Fellini’s camera. As a mockingbird impersonates a nightingale and blackbird, the speaker thinks of finding meaning in god, but failing.
“Journey, the North Coast”
The speaker awakes in a hammock as if on a ship, but reveals instead he is traveling by train. There was a man occupying the swinging bunk below, but he’s now gone. The final images are of the speaker packing a suitcase and the setting of the train is juxtaposed with a year of living out of that suitcase ensconced in a furnished room.
“Annotation”
This poem begins as an exultation of the newly apprehended awareness that the things we consider neutral in life—those which enact no clearly delineated positive or negative impact—are the things which not only endure, but flourish. What does not endure, much less flourish, are the lives of people which is really just a series of routine sacrifices thought to be of significance, but which all eventually are cast away into some dark corner of memory.
“The Meat Works”
This is a first-person dramatic monologue about a man describing his first day on the job at a slaughterhouse. The bulk of the poem is graphic description of the minutiae of that job as he tells of making a big mistake, but avoiding being fired due to being his first day. He also admits that though the workers were give bags of meat drowning in blood to take home, he comes to eschew the perk. The poem closes with an uneasy and not entirely resonating justification for the blood money.
“Harbour Dusk”
The speaker tells of how he and a woman he was came upon a fading harbor wall by way of an empty park. The imagery tells the story: “overcast sky,” yachts seen across the way on “empty fields of water,” the ships whispering among themselves “as though were resolve were ill.” It is a dark, unhappy place of “melancholy” and “evening confessionals.” The story of the poem, registering symbolically and almost subliminally, is that of a relationship sadly coming to an end.
