Mark Irwin

Powder
September 15, 2011 Irwin Mark

Powder

Yesterday I opened your pill box, and there

on one oblong chalk tablet, read with my finger

the laws by which we live—love, and with a pin’s

chisel wanted to carve more while your wrist

skirted that dark, and the cupidon of our past gazed down.

Mark Irwin’s ten collections of poetry include the recently published Shimmer (2020), winner of the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987- 2014), Tall If (2009), and Bright Hunger (2004). He recently completed a long translation project entitled Zanzibar: Selected Poems & Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, with an afterword by Alain Borer.