IT STARS WITH A GLAD COLLISION
then in your muscles,
the honking geese and the wind,
the unit of a universe
with no before or after,
where circles of decades
are counted by what
can count. Regardless,
you return, subsumed
by the world of named
things. There’s also
the attempt to rejoice
in what’s empty: in
the night, air between trees.
Tried that, but stopped
short each time. Air
is molecular, it’s all
substance. Atmosphere
an ocean for bottom-dwelling
humans. Wind nudging
branch—not the blank
reading the real, but
a grinding among the substantial.
Such incalculable grinding
destroys, then reconditions.
Old cities buried. Much
of the world is already destroyed,
and still nothing is empty:
THE SKULL BEHIND EVERY FACE
civilization was sensible
and terrifying. Nature
regarded it as little as it
regarded its human lives,
which were always snuffed
out before the next thing
there was to do. So now
the cities I’ve lived in
are buried. The places
I’ve never seen? Buried,
their histories self-contained
and entirely absent. Why
hold facts?—better to be
the absent-minded duck shot
full of holes, socked from flight
TRANSIT
to look in any direction, compose
order, and look in another direction
becomes flux. Moment there are
no more human eyes, no one’s here
to see all the redressing, which wouldn’t
be an evil thing: maybe a sad one,
having missed the chance to report
all you’ve seen. I noticed twelve
ceiling lights went like this: four
yellow, six green, two more yellow
down the center of the bus. It was
two years ago, and it was black
outside, passing through Brooklyn,
Hartford, and Boston, where I arrived
around 11 p.m. at North Station,
where I was to catch a train, and
which shared space with the city’s
largest arena, host that night to
a Rolling Stones show. The crowd
disgorged as I waited for the train.
Glasses, hair loss, sneakers: grapes of
looks and faces we had!—boarding
THE ABSENTEE DRESSMAKER
it’s the perfect hourglass: now for it, a dress?
You step into a room,
there’s an equation spilled
up down and across
the wall. Anything
presenting itself as complex
is daunting, but makes sense
once it makes sense.
Beautiful.
Otherwise—ocean,
thick with salt and vegetation,
crawlers, villas of coral.
Ideas you’ve had and lost.
The blackest regions
of the sea, those that haven’t
been explored, are not
beautiful, not yet. And
the sky’s even more
trouble than the sea—
more massive darkness,
more sparkling salt.
Any question, then,
why we’re so frightened
of matters such as our cosmic smallness?
A clear view of the stars
suffices for a moment—
each speck scattered with a code of its own.
Before time is a problem
and people keep dying anyway
THE FUNCTION OF ROUTINE
as kids, my brother Jim and I
had to wheel our dishwasher
across the kitchen and connect
it to the sink with a plastic
something of hoses and tubes.
Hoses and tubes. The benefit
of cleaning is knowing that
no matter what, you’re doing
the right thing. I should like
very much to recall the details
of cupboards and appliances
I’ve had in various homes. How
dull. To open my current dish-
washer, I push through a strange
flap with my four unopposable
digits and pull an easy handle.
My last dishwasher didn’t
operate as such, so like any
routine, however mindless, this
is one I backed into. But it’s
you and only you attempting
memory at the various forms
of muscle memory you develop,
then lose simply because you relocate.
Still, memories ruin and compete.
They interrupt each other. It’s
said eight homes in the last twelve
years. There are reasons to stay
one place a long time. Muscles and bone
an editor of Coldfront Magazine.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 5 |
4 |
3 |
2 | 1 |