Bruce Edward Litton - Two Poems

Remembering Fahrenheit 451

Coldest depths of space,
Remote and weightless darkness,
Void between relations
Surrendered to indirection—
No fire could burn
As absolute zero would seize
Functions meant for a world.

Tight money clenched
Until girders break
Holding up ceilings and bridges,
Vanguard endures unknown.

A child emerges
From the stars’ womb
And begins to shape the world anew
As suitors of the old vanish,
Penetrated by arrows of an Odysseus
Vagabond and bare, peer of the father
Tending to his son.
Knowledge and art fills the child
As does bread and water.

Light is added to darkness;
Air stirs in light’s heat.
Wind resembles world’s whorl.
And the moon’s appearance,
Fragmentarily appearing behind a cloud,
Is like the father’s shattered face
When smoke shifts over a lonely fire.



Flood of Dreams

Forests drain darkness, leaden light pours
Onto plains pursued by molten flames.
Omaha shimmers a steel suit.
Downpours dropped from tiers
Of eastward roaming thunderheads
Glaze a merchant gazebo like pottery.

The dark insides of purses and wallets
Complement knee sockets above wet concrete,
Pedestrian sway approaching day’s work grind.
Bodies feed a beast of energy—
Wood fires here once warmed settlement hearths;
Electronic signals extend the city globally.
Supercell hailstones like littleneck clams stripped,
Eaten, their broken shells discarded
Like wampum on a stone floor—
Rain flows over pavement and through soil beyond
The open door, swallows and reproduces stone
Like the calcium armor of mollusks,
As if fluidity at once seeks
Dark of oblivion and light of being,
Form mineralizing, time suspended,
Ground stable in gravity’s equilibrium
As fingers’ presses link an electrical storm.

Confused in Omaha’s lit glare, desperate
For a drink as if rum will dissolve the constellation
Of neon inspired illusions within himself,
A banker sits at the raw bar,
Forks a living clam, and douses
Horseradish and ketchup, slamming the rum



Bruce Edward Litton's poetry appears in Ocean, Small Brushes, The Fauquier Poetry Journal, other journals, and will soon appear in Columbia Review.