SHRINKING ISLAND (Assateague)
Looking Inland, beneath
A rising vapor of cumulous,
An agony of trees.
Beyond the killing tide,
Low dunes. Here,
The mosquito is queen,
The island a changeling,
Creature of wind, surf,
Currents, undertows;
A flow of sand and shells,
Of winged and rooted things.
FOUR HORSES
A wild blue horse is galloping,
Out of the sun and down the green hill.
Everyone inhales its sweet breath;
The beautiful blue horse with a cloud for a heart,
With a stride wide as noon,
Leaps over malls, power stations,
Parking lots, the wandering stains of rivers,
Over wheat fields, plains of corn,
Cities, highways, and towns;
The red snake of cars smoking
Out of the valleys.
No one looks up through the thickening air,
At the pale blue horse, sun
Set for an eye, as it flies over
The last of the trees,
The darkening mountains,
And under the earth.
The thundering white horse,
The gray, forever
Chasing its tail,
The black one to come.
Michael Fallon is a poet and essayist and a Senior Lecturer in English at UMBC where he has taught creative writing, literature, and composition since 1985. Poems have appeared in the American Scholar, The Antietam Review, The Potomac review, Sin Fronteras, the Oyez Review, and in many other literary magazines. Essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in the Maryland English Journal, The Loch Raven Review, the New England Review and other magazines. Fallon was a winner of 2 Maryland State Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry in 1988 and 2009 and is the author of 3 collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black published by Dolphin-Moon Press in 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and published in 2011, and The Great Before and After published by BrickHouse Books in 2011. Recently, Fallon’s nonfiction essay, The Other Side of Silence, was selected by lithub.com, The Best of the Literary Internet and posted on its website. His book of poems, House of Forgotten Names, was accepted by Salmon Press of Ireland.
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