Sample Poems by T.D. Walker

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New Moon

After the second moon arrived, the first said
nothing. The earth did not hide
its disappointment behind the moon's
lumpy shadow. The earth was not

pulled by new tides. The night
birds, used to sodium-vapor's
glow, did not watch its rising. Only
we recalibrate ourselves, looking

for small creatures in the darkness to die
off or overrun the fields behind our houses.
An old man lets a cat out the back door.
One plane crashes. Another

lands on time. Its passengers check
the carousel for their bags. The tour bus
fills, leaves for the dark sky
field where they'll set up for the viewing.

We'll fill this one too, the tourists
say. The second moon rises. The first
does not show from this distance
where we've landed, again and again.

Someone will say the new
moon does not exist, we cannot
see it without our instruments.
In the morning, the old man

lets the cat back inside. The bus
pulls away from the field. The plane takes
off from the same runway. The first moon
cannot see the second: what we see

in the darkness, a flash caught suddenly,
the eye tugging at itself.

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The Artificial Intelligence of Grief

In this proposed timeline, you are still
a mechanic, a self-taught musician,
a veteran of the Second World
War, a farmer born in a lighthouse.

What has changed is that I too
have a barn filled with fine pliers,
screwdrivers, bolts, glass jars filled
with a lifetime of small connecting

things. In this proposed timeline,
I have taken your pocket watch, or
the one I remember, and I have
programmed it to remember you:

Each half- heard story from your
childhood, half-heard in mine;
each phrase in a language I cannot
read; each holy observance

of a practice your half- remembered
grandparents left or fled. This watch
cannot grieve you. Like all stopped
clocks, it gives only an illusion

of meaning: a stray poppy in a hay bale,
a name on a headstone.

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New Moon: Eclipse

1.

Come, moonlet, too small to be
tidally locked to Earth. Who waits
beneath this night sky in which you
cannot be seen to mark your passage
behind Earth's Moon, first Moon-

2.

Each sufficiently large moon becomes
locked to its planet. You showed me that
twenty-year old picture of us, and now
how do I tell you I can't see myself
without seeing that shadow covering-

3.

Come, moonlet. You too will pass
behind the Moon the way everything
passes that we cannot hold to closely.
You'll emerge from behind that light
you can never see yourself in-

Come, moonlet.
Come.

---

Iris

Afternoons, in what he calculates must be spring,
he leans against the little table and draws from memory:
irises, heavy and purple. In the ship's model library,
species after species bloom on screen. He chooses
instead to remember, to push against the page
the way petals push back after a bee's launch.
From this angle, the frill of the beard. From this,
some irregularity of color, as imprecise as

the signal they are chasing is exact. Sometimes,
he allows himself to look back at a photograph,
his mother, her face half-obscured by a bloom, her face
half-obscured by the expression he knows
as her observation. This is what calls them out:
not a mother's voice calling out for him to see the spring's
first purple emerging from a tall green stalk,
but some regularity, half-obscured by what is watching.

They have all sought the meaning of the signal.
While he draws, he wonders whether those calling out
will pluck a couple of his shipmates and press them,
petals drying between the pages of an old novel.
Or if they will draw the specimens, time and again,
adding after the life has gone some frills where there were none,
or some greater intensity of color-

Or, if, like the iris,
they will have bloomed for a time, to be caught
in light before the next season consumes them:
the regular pulse of the remaining signal
becoming a picture of a running child, a blur behind
the sharpness of the irises, waiting.