from Lucky Thirteens
Another variation on the sonnet theme, these poems are a work in progress.
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WHERE THE SOUL SNAPS, in the forest,
There the blinds reshuffle, passing
One more out; first lesion; antler-cradle.
The rifle makes a cross against the birch,
More meets no-more, drops the sodden carpet
Onto sod. Spark uncoils a scale to heaven
Help us count them in and out.
Chambers set with welts of gold.
Leaf-shatter, blackout, last flame-pathos,
Stir the bodies in the lake like logs. About
The camera-silver dragonfly
A thread of smoke or whitened hair there hangs.
What goes up must come down with bleeding arms.
COPPER BIRD BIRD SHUFFLE
Through the orchestra some tongues vibrate.
Send the ribbons flying from the maze
And wait for the repeat. They turn a violent red.
Along the ledge, a rank of insect husks
Is trembling in the moving air. Her voice descends
Ahead of her in waves, to pull her down
Into the trap-eye corner of the glass
No sharpened mouth can crack. Branches,
Syringe-spatter, chords dice through the heart
Producing flowers in a pattern, rising
On the cusp, an echo swallows excess light.
Summer is a-coming in this wide room.
STORIES FOR THE LOTUS-MIST LAMENT
The damp-smoke of those bales and reeds
Come reaching down the throat-bells, weeds
Enwrap the cedar-box, about the trees the crimson silks ignite.
Puppets multiply in fields, the lines
Pass lacking origin, they fibrillate
In paper veins. A mandolin
Is slicing soil in silver clatters
On the starry bank a bright nymph drowns, her tongue
Annealed to other tongues, stuck with spots of ash.
Oh, the lovely losing, sucked into the wind’s skin,
A diaphragm that shines with his distended face.
Everything comes to those who wait forever.
CHURCH WITH OWL-SPORES CLOUDING,
Millennium between each wing-bat
Bellows silence. On a post, a black sticks
Crowning down the sides, and then the pearly
Grey that’s pink and brown, it shudders
In the chapel, eddies in the rafters,
Sprays undying fungus from the heavens;
Fire of figures in the oven-box.
All still waiting, crush the perfume
From the dead, the wing lifts like a
Bandage. Puff, and masonry dissolves
Its biscuits, spun through air onto a tongue.
Every time we say goodbye to inundated ground.