THE THERE THERE
Rain plumps the country up,
and the country was plenty plump
enough, a big country
with its big yellow mouth
of an interstate warning
HARD EDGE
until we felt the soft
shoulder give way
give way beneath our tires,
jerked the wheel to the left,
toward some consolation
forming in a far
corner of the hangar.
Air power. Maybe war would
bring the far sea closer.
Better oars do that.
The ambassador said,
This war will find another
war to hide behind.
Were those blue bells
in the field? No,
helmets abandoned
by the occupying forces.
The ambassador said,
The cities are violent,
yes, but you’ll be fine
if it’s raining. So we woke
to see if water fell
as the day began,
as war began for the day
before the day began
for those who began the war.
It was us. We heard it
on the radio. We passed
a weathered sign
that read Men at Wor-
That’s how we knew.
SWORD OF SPAIN
“It is the cause, it is the cause…”
-Othello
What is that
sword like
what does it
conjure
from which Basque
craftsman
was it…
—no, see here
tempered in
the ice brook
among the last
green shoots
that soon
meet winter
which will be
gray
will go to
my head
and from there
to where
what’s done
across the world
is done
in our name
here is a man (o
fellow-feeling)
who speaks:
as I slay
in Aleppo
I slay
myself.
TERRARIUM
Cat at the screen door.
Red mountain heather
cupping last daylight
in its bells. If we notice this
are we not barbarians?
Hare in the penumbra
safe from all but the owl.
We lay a glass bowl over it.
Now safe from everything
but the inside.
Originally from coastal Maine, Bill Carty lives in Seattle, WA. He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, the Richard Hugo House, the Sorting Room, and Jack Straw. He is the author of Huge Cloudy (forthcoming from Octopus Books) and the chapbook Refugium (Alice Blue Books). His poems have recently appeared (or will soon) in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Willow Springs, Conduit, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, the Volta, Oversound, Pinwheel, Sixth Finch, and other journals. He is an editor at Poetry Northwest.