Andy Eaton

Andy Eaton is the author of Sprung Nocturne, a pamphlet, and his poems appear in Copper Nickel, Narrative, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review, among other places.

Oxford Blues

One long smoke-line, like the slow murmuration

of starlings, all grains and grain-work of shade
across the sky's pink marble. Clouds like unripe fruit.

I stand where I always stand. I walk

where I already found a way. What remains
remains closed to us. Which is to say, we are

in the next room by the time we know

we're there and what we are there,
and what there is there to do. To be done.

Bright flowers cloak the cherry tree.

A yellow traffic sign I exclude from the shot,
before I send it from my phone

to Holly's, in another country back home
today, the same countries
as tomorrow.

Time is the energy we spend our lives by.
Not knowing where it goes, not able to without it

—we stand on hard steps under a lukewarm sun.
We grit our jaws and ask the sky

nothing—our biggest question. We look

out on a city at evening and wonder, in late light
about something else. Someone's hand
reaching into our pocket.