Lindsay Hill was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry including Contango, and The Empty Quarter (both from Singing Horse Press). Sea of Hooks, his first novel,was published by McPherson & Company in late 2013 and won the 2014 PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the 2015 IPPY Gold Medal for Literary Fiction. Lindsay works in the nonprofit sector and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, the painter Nita Hill.

from Socket

If a place explains itself in a sack of shards if a place where feet struck locks

In the ground with their heals accelerates from an edge on a bed of wheels and loss

Where disarticulated conveyances scatter their marriage of severed hands and gears

Across an actinide field of mirror-works and pasts in-folded into mileage and exhaust

If a mountain finds its place in the lake-moss floor if a head wind finds its house

If a drum is called a spoke in a fan of streets if a leash has kept a hand and

Throat apart how the sea in its cubic paragraphs of breadth cannot be known nor

The famous aluminum heart nor a voice below waves nor the infinite machinery of eyes

Ah, Helium, invisible yet able to hold up ships
we perceive
every object in its own time
                    in which the object watches the blue cover pass

there is an unbreakable limit for all life
we call this death
in the cosmos we call this light
we make the calls

Helium is the light of the sun
and its time is an aesthetic phenomenon
coupled with the rising yellow glow of the retribution
the post human
and the cyborg

poetics is the final fantasy of contradictory entities

what would a global phenomenon feel like?
it would feel like living
like the season we're not having

Helium is the element of the fall
tucked away under the rocks
mixed with industrial leak detection