No. 6

Nothing came, nothing to note.
Just the hawk shrieks wheeling in the distant
skies above.
As if it was enough to declaw
the only living thing.
There are three ways to transform an object
(shift/rotate/reflect).
Discontinual, I took the high road and the road
tore open, quaking.
It was a childish fear I felt
to see the rank and file moving past me.
Junk King, coming out of your embankment,
how do you justify owning
this one and only bed? This stone garden.
We might have made a room
out of emptiness, except the window was too tall
to see out of.
Does it matter? —these words
or those, yours, rid of all— red—
I turn around in my own image,
and nothing looks back.

Each Wave Series 

What is voice if not [the endless]
wave seeking another wave a way out
where last I went in the middle
halved in the whole       

         the deformations of an idea
of breath falling obscurely
on itself
like snow drifts off trees /

mercilessly for the duration         with shaded indifference
borne                 / if not

to reach the end of the destruction of destruction:
bonfire of vanities

          a certain
mortification of the work

this brooding lip curbs a corner
while the crack in the ceiling paint

comes steadily further apart

an excised voice dipped in the water
to pull back its reflection

comes as a guest

until the words fade too
last at sea                  
each wave series is its own event

my flesh knows the bones that turned
beneath this day dispatched

unlimited, the world goes its own way                       / and I another en
jambed


stepped into the sound       / slung back


like someone ducking in the air
crammed with speech

--------------------------------------------------------------------

                                    as if I could


press my body
to a distant place

awash in that dull repair

meet myself on the other side
stretched tightly across this band,

thinking trafficking on the thin line just before
a collision

the causal sea
paces back and forth

for ornament de facto
occlusions of a moment
torn loosely toward the sun

on this narrow plank brittle
the wave that breaks across a ragged
peak, cuffed across

black rocks, white foam
white flag, black rock

on which a bird
once

halted in the main, liquid or
languid, as if looking for a signal

To be extinguished is not
to be without want, only
in the undoing
you slip through

you move from wave to
   wave like rain
falling at the edge of the sea

   in a final rush

wake from departing clouds
as drapes are drawn across
the cold green floor

   I shift my chair.

Notes: “criticism is the mortification of the work”, Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977.
“Each wave series is its own event”: horse trainer, Martin Black in “Wave Riders: Sand, Surf, and Suppleness”, Western Horseman, Vol. 82, No. 2, February 2017.

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