Obstinance

Like the fine black dust of coal, it
settles on us; saddles us like stone game or
Custer cavaliers between the jawing maw of a rocky vale.
Snap of cold silver in the throat; anxious crackle and snap
of synapses; and our voices dry, coarse as straw.
It is the squaring of wild dogs off across
parchment plains;
Sense’s cession to the [...]

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These Things Fall Together

These things fall together and apart like a gull’s wing pull-or-pushing
on transparent inseams in the air.
How else could they occur?
 
She sharpens tools to shed the blood of an image of him;
he is whip-tongue, infamous, and cool in all cruelty.
These two,
bird and breeze;
shore and sea,
have never had a clash so bitter as their latest,
as Observers say, [...]

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Pyre

On the day you died
I envisioned jewelled and smoke-crowned fires twisting
in the sockets of your eyes. Those same flames
throw light onto my nights
when I would rather they be dark. Those same flames
burn sootblackness on my shoe-soles and reap
the thin grain in my field. Those same flames
I lit to keep you living
refuse to live themselves in [...]

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Of Nearing Beauty

Long have I polished versions of myself for a show
in the glass– those ten variations on a theme–
and long have I failed. Yet, for the sake of nearing beauty
I furnish further in the image of her pocket jewelry.
It is a clear essential.
 
On these days of wind, spruce-boughs buck and
shuffle from their anchors, gnarling boldly in [...]

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Dreamer’s Flags

When the clear pools bend and warp with the wind
or are scarved with gasoline;
when hot lights burn the dark out of the night or
cast hard rain into it;
when the ‘lectric troubadours change
key in midst of phrases to exit quietly onto chords and laurels;
when the summer girls lose shine and shape to
winter’s bulky coat the way [...]

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Thirty-Six

In the emptied lesson hall there is only him –
a tidy, birth-dayed pedant and postulator, a supposer of facts –
and the desks: six by rank and six by file;
thirty-six
counted desks. In the room of his own,
such arrangements are made,
and the devision of formulae yields a crop –
the same crop — with every harvest.
 
Patched elbows bear [...]

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A Brief Digression

It’s been a long time
since the first sproutlings from the germ of my blood,
here contained in the hollow cables within limbs
or in thin capillary nets,
huddled around fires,
the lights of their hearths little more than
brief digressions from the night.
 
From electric-lighted outposts in that same shade
of dark, I whittle hours away toward
the crowning of a day at [...]

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Your Faulty Harp

I have always been your furnished harp,
sounding all your flat notes sharp,
and I have always been a witless pet,
begging for what scraps I get.
I have always held the standard steady,
and made the uhlan corporal dread me
when it was I alone who did not flag;
I alone who held the rank.
I have trudged through brush and scrub,
laid [...]

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Epiphanies

The night that set upon you then was quite unlike the
blackblankets beneath trees,
or beneath the cool side of your house,
or tossed, unraveling, behind you in the noonday sun.
No, there are
grades and degrees of these things. Like good coffee,
good nights come out darker than the rest
while preserving and not
dousing out the starlight that it brings.
 
Yes, on [...]

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They Kill You in Ugly Ways

They kill you in such ugly ways
when they take and twist you in the paper or
on television.
Some would rush you out of womb and into life,
rush you through and through and through it.
And what remains?
 
“Rushed to hospital,” where was “pronounced dead.”
 
They kill you in ugly ways with
ugly photos and the ugly details (and these they
pick [...]

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