Somber

a few lost snowflakes
walk a moon-marbled
graveyard of spruce.

there's no hint of this kind of death,
unmarked and pure,
in the metros.
city corpses have a way
of hurrying to prove they're alive.

when solitude is your mortician
something has gone right.
when your priest is frost,
and only ice grieves.

forest silhouettes
never stop kneeling, never forget.
they are companions
who settled into a ceaseless hunch,
ever to guard.



Dewdrops

feeding the sun, not vice versa,
not long to bloom
in their petal-less way,
sparkles their heart attack,
heat the source of drips-
down they go like fingers
over the shoulder of a glass lover,
never knowing her face-

these fossils of breath
coughed from a dead artist
who couldn't work color,
his palette less real than the rest,
a pointillism of lack,
a breakwater round an adonis
too invisible to swim-

these nervous prisoners
motionless while light darts through their chains.
they cluster like minnows but no,
just a dapple of tagalongs
who hug tombs without loss,
cuddle roses without care.
they perch on our windows like vultures
who gnaw on their own fading fate.



Chris Crittenden was recently interviewed on Poets Café, a radio show of KPFK Los Angeles [very exciting!]. Additionally, he was invited to read at the University of Maine, for their program, “Meet Prominent Down East Poets.” Some recent acceptances are from: Hobble Press Review, Cider Press Review, Arsenic Lobster and Poetry Friends. He lives in the easternmost town in the US, near the Quoddy Lighthouse, with his artist wife Shanna and their two cats Barley and Bello.