Michael R. Burch



Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts, where he has published three Pulitzer Prize nominees and recent winners of the T. S. Eliot, Richard Wilbur and Howard Nemerov awards. His poetry has been translated into Farsi (Iranian) by Farideh Hassanzadeh Mostafavi and Dr. Mahnaz Badihian, and into Gjuha Shqipe (Albanian) by Majlinda Bashllari. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, and his work has appeared over 600 times in literary journals and sundry publications in the USA, England, Scotland, Canada, Iran, India, South Africa and Australia, including: Light Quarterly, The Chariton Review, The Lyric, Writer's Digest--The Year's Best Writing, The Best of the Eclectic Muse, Poet Lore, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Black Medina, Voices for Africa, Poetry Superhighway, ByLine, The New Formalist, Piedmont Literary Review, Iambs & Trochees, The Raintown Review, Mandrake Poetry Review, Verse Libre, Unlikely Stories, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, Numbat, Icon, Penumbra and Nebo. Burch is a past moderator of Rigorous Analysis, one of the top Internet poetry forums of its day, and was one of the first three judges of the Net Poetry & Arts Competition (NPAC). He has also served several poetry publications in either an advisory capacity or as a financial contributor, including New Native Press, Romantics Quarterly, The Raintown Review, The CommonPlace, MBooks/Multicultural Books and Triplopia. He has a personal poetry web site (doesn't everyone, and their dog?) at michaelburch.com.



Isolde’s Song

Through our long years of dreaming to be one
we grew toward an enigmatic light
that gently warmed our tendrils. Was it sun?
We had no eyes to tell; we loved despite
the lack of all sensation—all but one:
we felt the night’s deep chill, the air so bright
at dawn we quivered limply, overcome.

To touch was all we knew, and how to bask.
We knew to touch; we grew to touch; we felt
spring’s urgency, midsummer’s heat, fall’s lash,
wild winter’s ice and thaw and fervent melt.
We felt returning light and could not ask
its meaning, or if something was withheld
more glorious. To touch seemed life’s great task.

At last the petal of me learned: unfold.
And you were there, surrounding me. We touched.
The curious golden pollens! Ah, we touched,
and learned to cling and, finally, to hold.

Originally published by The Raintown Review, where it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize



For All That I Remembered

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought.
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I’d reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush
my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Originally published by The Raintown Review



What the Poet Sees

What the poet sees,
he sees as a swimmer underwater,
watching the shoreline blur,
sees through his breath’s weightless bubbles:
both worlds grow obscure.

Originally published by Mandrake Poetry Review



In Praise of Meter

The earth is full of rhythms so precise
the octave of the crystal can produce
a trillion oscillations, yet not lose
a second’s beat. The ear needs no device
to hear the unsprung rhythms of the couch
drown out the mouth’s; the lips can be debauched
by kisses, should the heart put back its watch
and find the pulse of love, and sing, devout.

If moons and tides in interlocking dance
obey their numbers, what is left to chance?
Should poets be more lax—their circumstance
as humble as it is?—or readers wince
to see their ragged numbers thin, to hear
of Nero’s death, yet mourn the Cavalier?

Originally published by The Eclectic Muse and The Best of the Eclectic Muse 1989-2003



Tremble

Her predatory eye,
the single feral iris,
scans.

Her raptor beak,
all jagged sharp-edged thrust,
juts.

Her hard talon,
clenched in pinched expectation,
waits.

Her clipped wings,
preened against reality,
tremble.

Originally published by The Lyric



See

See how her hair has thinned: it doesn't seem
like hair at all, but like the airy moult
of emus who outraced the wind and left
soft plumage in their wake. See how her eyes
are gentler now; see how each wrinkle laughs,
and deepens on itself, as though mirth took
some comfort there and burrowed deeply in,
outlasting winter. See how very thin
her features are—that time has made more spare,
so that each bone shows, elegant and rare.

For loveliness remains in her grave eyes,
and courage in her still-delighted looks:
each face presented like a picture book’s.
Bemused, she blows us undismayed goodbyes.

Originally published by Writer’s Digest’s -- The Year’s Best Writing 2003



Ordinary Love

Indescribable—our love—and still we say
with eyes averted, turning out the light,
"I love you," in the ordinary way

and tug the coverlet where once we lay,
all suntanned limbs entangled, shivering, white ...
indescribably in love. Or so we say.

Your hair’s blonde thicket now is tangle-gray;
you turn your back; you murmur to the night,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Beneath the sheets our hands and feet would stray
to warm ourselves. We do not touch despite
a love so indescribable. We say

we’re older now, that "love" has had its day.
But that which Love once countenanced, delight,
still makes you indescribable. I say,
"I love you," in the ordinary way.

Winner of the 2001 Algernon Charles Swinburne poetry contest; originally published by Romantics Quarterly, where it was nominated for the Pushcart Prize



Memory

A black ringlet
curls to lie
at the nape of her neck,
glistening with sweat
in the evaporate moonlight ...
This is what I remember
now that I cannot forget.

And tonight,
if I have forgotten her name,
I remember:
rigid wire and white lace
half-impressed in her flesh ...

our soft cries, like regret,

... the enameled white clips
of her bra strap
still inscribe dimpled marks
that my kisses erase ...
now that I have forgotten her face.

Originally published by Poetry Magazine



At Wilfred Owen’s Grave

A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for one brief flurry: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.

Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of "ergotherapists" that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath’s transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.

Originally published by The Chariton Review



Because Her Heart Is Tender, for Beth

She scrawled soft words in soap: "Never Forget,"
Dove-white on her car’s window, and the wren,
because her heart is tender, might regret
it called the sun to wake her. As I slept,
she heard lost names recounted, one by one.

She wrote in sidewalk chalk: "Never Forget,"
and kept her heart’s own counsel. No rain swept
away those words, no tear leaves them undone.

Because her heart is tender with regret,
bruised by razed towers’ glass and steel and stone
that shatter on and on and on and on,
she stitches in wet linen: "NEVER FORGET,"
and listens to her heart’s emphatic song.

The wren might tilt its head and sing along
because its heart once understood regret
when fledglings fell beyond, beyond, beyond ...
its reach, and still the boot-heeled world strode on.

She writes in adamant: "NEVER FORGET"
because her heart is tender with regret.

Originally published by The Neovictorian/Cochlea



Water and Gold

You came to me as rain breaks on the desert
when every flower springs to life at once,
but joy is an illusion to the expert:
the Bedouin has learned how not to want.

You came to me as riches to a miser
when all is gold, or so his heart believes,
until he dies much thinner and much wiser,
his gleaming bones hauled off by chortling thieves.

You gave your heart too soon, too dear, too vastly;
I could not take it in; it was too much.
I pledged to meet your price, but promised rashly.
I died of thirst, of your bright Midas touch.

I dreamed you gave me water of your lips,
then sealed my tomb with golden hieroglyphs.

Originally published by The Lyric



Fountainhead

I did not delight in love so much
as in a kiss like linnets’ wings,
the flutterings of a pulse so soft
the heart remembers, as it sings:
to bathe there was its transport, brushed
by marble lips, or porcelain,—
one liquid kiss, one cool outburst
from pale rosettes. What did it mean ...

to float awhirl on minute tides
within the compass of your eyes,
to feel your alabaster bust
grow cold within? Ecstatic sighs
seem hisses now; your eyes, serene,
reflect the sun’s pale tourmaline.

Originally published by Romantics Quarterly



For Rhonda, with Butterflies

Where does the butterfly go
when lightning rails and thunder howls
and hailstones scream and winter scowls
and storms compound the frost with snow?
Where does the butterfly go?

Where does the rose hide its bloom
when night descends oblique and chill
and stars such vacuum fail to fill?
Where does she then her bloom bestow,
and where does the butterfly go?

And where shall the spirit flee
when life is harsh, too harsh to face,
and hope is lost without a trace?
Oh, when the light of life runs low,
where does the butterfly go?

Originally published by Tucumcari Literary Review



Ince St. Child

When she was a child
  in a dark forest of fear,
    imagination cast its strange light
      into secret places,
      scattering traces
    of illumination so bright,
  years later, they might suddenly reappear,
their light undefiled.

When she was young,
  the shafted light of her dreams
    shone on her uplifted face
      as she prayed;
      though she strayed
    into a night fallen like mildewed lace
  shrouding the forest of screams,
her faith led her home.

Now she is old
  and the light that was flame
    is a slow-dying ember ...
      What she felt then
      she would explain;
    she would if she could only remember
  that forest of shame,
faith beaten like gold.

Originally published by Songs of Innocence



You can read more of Michael Burch's poetry at michaelburch.com.