Brief Encounters with my Third Eye: Selected Poems

By Bruce Boston

Over one hundred of Boston’s best short poems (under fifty lines) from more than forty years of publishing, including fifteen award-winning poems.

Boston’s poetry has received the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov’s Readers Award, and the Rhysling and Grandmaster Awards of the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

“Boston forces us to make eye contact with alchemists, angels, ghosts, werewolves, demagogues, monsters, demons, spacers, robots, berserkers, their lovers, and their victims. Inventive, speculative to the point of skewering us with wonder, innovative, resonant with melody, this overview of Boston's work from the early 70s to the present dramatizes the development of one of America's most skilled and inspired poets.” – Mary Turzillo, Lovers & Killers, Mars Girls, Elgin and Nebula Award Winner

“In these fleet, always musical poems, Boston spotlights not only infinite vistas of time and space but also the grottos of our most intransigent longings and fears. These same poems may move us to gasp or guffaw to the point of finding ourselves, to purloin a phrase of the poet's, ‘polymorphously pleasure-spent.’ Brief Encounters twinkles luminously and always delivers.” – Michael Bishop, Nebula Award Winner, author of Other Arms Reach Out to Me: Georgia Stories

“With Brief Encounters, Boston manages an amazing feat: he not only knocks it out of the park, but also shows us he's been doing it for decades. A great read for anyone who enjoys seeing what wonders words can work...and who isn't afraid to step into the dark from time to time.” – Michaelbrent Collings, multiple Bram Stoker Award Nominee and bestselling author of The Longest Con

Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing - Tales from the Darkest Depths

Interview with the author:

So what makes this collection of selected short poems so special?

Bruce Boston: It contains more than a hundred of my best poems under fifty lines collected from more than forty years of publishing, including 14 award-winning poems.

Which poem is your favorite and why?

Bruce Boston: Hard to pick a single favorite in over 100 poems, but if I have to, I'd go with "For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets."  It was my first Rhysling Award poem and the one that most readers seem to remember.

Why should readers give dark poetry book a try?

Bruce Boston: Because it is poetry written for and available to any literate reader, not just other poets.

Brief Encounters eBook categories:

• US Horror Fiction
• Poetry collection
• Dark poetry collection
• Horror haiku writing
• Horror Suspense
• Psychological thriller
• Fantasy
• Dystopian Science fiction
• Horror literature
• Post apocalyptic science fiction

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crystal Lake Publishing
• Release date: Feb 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781684187584

Bruce Boston

Bruce Boston lives in Ocala, Florida, once known as The City of Trees, with his wife, writer-artist Marge Simon, and the ghosts of two cats. He is the author of fifty books and chapbooks, including the novels The Guardener's Tale and Stained Glass Rain. His writing has appeared in hundreds of publications, most visibly in Asimov's SF, Amazing Stories, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Pedestal, Strange Horizons, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and the Nebula Awards Showcase. Boston has received the Bram Stoker Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the SFPA. His graphic art and designs appear both in print and online. For more information, visit http://www.bruceboston.com

Book preview

CONTENTS

1970S

Artist as Owl

The Alchemist Is Born in a Sudden Changing of Seasons

Night Flight

The Beast at Vespers

Horses of Light

Soul of a Victorian

1980S

The Alchemist Discovers a Universal Solvent

The Alchemist Takes a Lover in the Infinite Variety of Fire

A Word Before the Ice Wars

Ouroboros

Ancient Catch

Of Time and the Sidereal Shore

Denizens

The FTL Addict Fixes

For Spacers Snarled in the Hair of Comets

The Berserker Enters a Plea on the Death of Greater Los Angeles: Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity

The Evolution of the Death Murals

The Knowledge at Londrai

All of the Lady in Sly Concoction

Beyond the Edge of Alien Desire

The Mating of the Storm Birds

Clear to Eternity

Dead Heat

Curse of the Demon’s Wife

A Hero of the Spican Conflict

In the Eyes of the Pilot

The Nightmare Collector

Against the Ebon Rush of Night

Curse of the Werewolf’s Wife

Mean Time Tomorrow

The Sizing of Curses

America Comes

Old Robots Are the Worst

The Inevitability of Light

1990S

Curse of the Shapeshifter’s Wife

Curse of the Angel’s Wife

A Spacer’s Life Is Ice and Fire

Born a Royal Beast

Rara Avis

Curse of the Time-Traveler’s Wife

Curse of the Body-Thief’s Wife

Future Present: A Lesson in Expectation

Stars May Rise to Hell and Back

Curse of the SF-Writer’s Wife

Interior Monologue with Mirror

To Dine with Poetry and Mathematics

California Noir

Gravity Drives the Blood

In a Palace of Stone

The Veracity of Imagination

My Wife Returns as She Would Have It

New Colors and Old

The Evening News on the Morning after the Final Solution

Conditions of Sentient Life

Curse of the Ghost’s Wife

Curse of the Bandersnatch’s Wife

Spacer’s Compass

The Poetry of Science Fiction*

2000S

I Build Engines

The Man Who Lives in the Attic

Freakish Confirmation

Surreal Domestic

Of Glass, of Fire, of Elements Abundantly Defined

Robovamp

Shells: The Next Generation

Why Your Robot Dog Has Been Recalcitrant

The Filing Cabinets of K.

The City and the Stars

Dali’s Ego on Karloff’s Frankenstein

Revealing Their Eyes

Origami Rockets

Tale of the Bluegone Boy

Heavy Weather

Shadow Light

Ghost People

Knife People

The Slums of Atlantis

The Dimensional Rush of Relative Primes

Visions of the Blue Clone

Cat People

No Need

Conflicted as a Warrior Poet

Dystopian Dusk

Gargoyle People

The Last Alchemist

2010S

A Life in the Day Of

Lizards and Wind

Surreal Wish List

Middletown, USA, 1953

Relative Weights and Measures

The Lateral Eclipse of Bound Sunsets

Noir People

The Music of Particle Physics

Tourists from the Future

When Beyond the Furious Clouds

She Walks in Yellow to Please Her Lord

Containment

Surreal Couple

Intimations of a Dead Immortality

Septuagenarian Flashback

Slicing Time

Surreal Shopping List

Here

The Music of the Stars

AWARD POEMS IN THIS COLLECTION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

OMISSIONS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE ARTIST

CONNECT WITH CRYSTAL LAKE PUBLISHING

1970S

Artist as Owl

Do I feel

an affinity with owls

because I watch everything,

or because

my feathers are so soft?

The Alchemist Is Born in a Sudden Changing of Seasons

Each winter morning,

bare and heavy,

apprenticed to the fires

of the smithy’s shop,

he bore his trade upon his back,

he forged his soul to cooling metals.

Plangently the hammer would ring

in the day’s first stillness,

loud against a chalky sun,

sending the wrens to higher perches

in the oaks and sycamores,

the deserted reaches of the barn.

Such blows would shake his teeth,

drop sparks about his ankles

and singe the hair

upon his turning arms.

Each falling arc trembled

the air in its breaking.

One day he watched the sun

drift north, bright as his furnace.

The snow had fled the gables,

and by the morning roadside,

soft crucibles of gold

opened among the leaves.

Climbing to the loft

he was stunned, left speechless.

There in the darkness,

pale as old straw,

the pulsing throat

of a bird he could not name.

Night Flight

Boots wet, you return to the tower.

You shake your hair from the scarf.

Come close beneath the covers.

All the clocks are melting.

I will search your back for wings.

The Beast at Vespers

after Jean Cocteau

The daisies turn blue at dusk.

The moon is the rib of Adam,

and the night,

a woman grown around it.

The carcass of a fawn

bloodies the garden path.

Horses of Light

As the storm runs west at dusk

the light gives up the air,

the lurching sea turns dark

and sleek as otter skin,

a great bloody horse blooms

in the sun’s red setting.

Dali has penned such rearing cumuli

in moments of rare attraction,

the flecks of mica on the table

shining beneath his ringed hand,

the waiter with a single absinthe,

the sun always down to dark waters.

Prophets and mariners can mount

these blood and cloudy steeds.

They gather the sky’s loose reins

to ride against the night

with long hair streaming,

feet lodged in stirrups of air.

In the wake of avid hooves

the sky lies sleek and dark,

the plumping stars mere flecks