Jennifer Spector
MIGRATIONS
… nadie sabe dónde se ha perdido
ni a qué silencio entró.
(Nobody knows the place where he is lost
nor what silence he has entered) – Octavio Paz
blade with me in low
grasses, stay quiet the pirate
birds and cocoritos deep building rough nests
pinwheel the trees
let us lay to ground or
island for weeks
to roost on dry cliffs
gliding colibríes, gavilanes, warm updrafts driving patterns
of sea and selvage as they whet the till
pacific boundaries blurred
their edgelands
dentations cleaving
trench of the body
something carried in
follow me to the rough house, sleep near quiet water, trail our
carrion at the sound swimming
iguanas headed to islands will walk
across land
clutches of thirty
share nests along mangroves and rivers
even the crocodiles emerge at night, stalking the swamp
brakes
o the waterthrush sing few at a time
over canopies of Malagueto, Jobo, Cecropia
their mahogany song a sea-going ship
marked: all the warblers have shored here
in highlands in breeding
dress they soon depart
& the suicide tree after a hundred years
finally matures
then in april, clusters brown flowers
waits for the dry season sheds leaves
to the wind
produces dies
much like the wanderer
in snow whose every small egress
first spades then flights the hollow
COEVAL
How far dark fruit plumping vine
Purples the holloway saffron fields
Crêping in reave
How far in time we walk
Geese plundering tallow ground
Harvest loose of fosse
Carr and cloudbow the kyle’s runnel
Rowan surrender to brier
Nut unsplit a bugle’s last
Lullaby toasting the belly liege
Carom, kalanji, argent skin
Amber of bodies cadenced
By filament and fissure
Witched off same cloth
How far and fulgent
A later sun seeking cover
Fields the swire with its flares
Copyright © Jennifer Spector 2016
Jennifer Spector is a writer from New York City, living and working in Panama. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Reliquiae, Fulcrum, Litmus, La Vague Journal, Tzak: a journal of poetry and poetics, Suelo vol 1 (arts & ecology chapbook), Promethean and elsewhere. Her lyric essays have been published on the "ship's log" for Performance Studies International #21- Fluid States. Recently, her series of 100 'flaschenpost' landscape poem-origami, created from maps of Panama from the 1950s, were included in Genesis Tree New York, artist Valerie Hird’s exhibited installation, comprised of 4,000 origami works from around the world. She is currently designing a site-specific collaboration with land artists to take place this year on Isla Gobernadora, Panama. jenniferspectorstudio.com