afternoon? If it is
it’s a weird one, a place unfit for a poet
but not a place
unfit for other people
who calmly disregard
everything but winter
in a terrifying way. An idea
along the edge of a season
means much more. An idea
is one born from nothing
and destined to tunnel
its way into a hole meant
for a creature or for air seeking
out a place as only air does.
Overwhelmed? That’s only half
of it. You can replace me
if you like. You can look
straight into a mirror and feel frantic all without me.
When I say idea, I mean content.
If you thought this was both the ending
and beginning of things,
you were wrong. It’s all up
in the air, all past, future,
and present at once. One thing is certain:
we can’t see past
speaking, and if we could,
it would only be a thread.
Don’t Look Back
It isn’t clear why one would want to see
the source of a river, but perhaps
stepping across the headwaters
amounts to something memorable.
This does not take into account
the fact that our memories only reflect
the moment we find ourselves in. Tomorrow
it’s a distant sense of dread, but today
it’s too normal for even
the news. Each day is a fit of beginnings,
and each day is determined to replace
the next. Too long we’ve been silent
on matters best left in the past,
and I keep forgetting each
righteous fact began as a trembling one.
Exhibit A
Would it be enough to suggest
the smoke from across the hill
suggests a type of life or a type of living?
I’d like to be stranger than I’ve been.
One bite taken from an apple and left
in the yard for an animal
to scavenge. Could this be a day
or any day? I’d like to think so.
I’d like to think there’s something
to be said for closeness
to death, as if nearly leaving this world
can color our existence in a particular way
or another. I miss you, we might say
to ourselves in those moments,
but those moments lumber ahead
without us where another person
is making copies, sipping the last bit of coffee
for a day going,
a day already half-gone. I miss you,
we might say to each other in those moments,
as if repetition can be a way of
or even a minor attempt at remembering.
Home as a Haunt
Reconsidering or considering companionship seems
too studious or perhaps
even too stubborn
for someone
as careful as yourself. This pathway
pardons care, but what you have
when you’re all free of care
and gardens makes
as much sense
as where you began.
America’s farmlands haunt your syntax,
your sense of being, or at least
the filter between an object and your notion of
what it means
to exist as an object.
To be ablaze inside the color blue like a fixed identity
is to place a word
over here and another word there beneath
the first. This life maintains
its level of supposing so stoically
that you would think intention had given birth to it.
The End Time Before the End Time
Whatever an elegy’s opposite might be,
the river outlasted the city
before this one,
old
