“The Orchard That Was Right for You”
Setting: The
Water.
Shawls, a wharf,
a rope, a password.
Smiles are a pattern you wear indicating a dagger.
An outfit, an ensemble. An ensembly. An assembly.
Acquiescent
demands. The water a place
to be pampered. The setting not a specific setting.
The
coded language of a region inaccessible to the uninitiated.
What
we think we know, but we don’t.
Always confusing deictic
and enclitic.
Sinkholes open up
cleverly disguised.
Everyday mundane questions; another summer
coming to take its hand from the sun.
This is a land memoir.
“Fish tales” is
an idiom that means the fish are speaking.
Bluetoothvegetables.
Talking in
specifics around a nonspecificity.
Pointed
accusations coming to
take their hands from
the moon.
Not a space for
stopping to think or reconsider,
but something to fall into and be lost forever in.
“That odd, dank
furor of attention.”
No sense of time
rushing past or other people’s sense of time.
Being the pivot,
but stopping just short,
but being
adorable. And in the shadows,
the memories of
everyone else
who’s ever looked
down into
Rivers, basins, lobes, deposits, locks, and levees. The Gulf.
Wishes that are
shadows.
Wishes you never
remember.
Wish’s decline a
sort of wholesomeness.
Animistic wish
flying but no longer a wish, a bird.
A list of things
that are fresh or might be.
A word that
reminds you of a previous crisis.
That moment after
a sound reverberates.
Negative
striation.
We look for a
beginning in the wreckage.
Verdancies profligate.
“Nurse of the Arcades”
Question of
whether we are at shores or gardens.
“there there,” she
says, or “there” —> pointing. Deictic.
“It nourishes
other asides it knows nothing of.”
I don’t want to
say what comes after. Dancing
after, sidestepping what’s passed, is still passing,
passes over us.
Tedious crossfading.
Something to escape, or something to escape to.
“My fear is like
a small house: you can come visit me/
but it will not
go away.” Passing through as a sort of
departure. Something
is always coming loose in the poem.
Chilly, unripe
fruit, timeless or nonspecific time.
Being put to the
test, but not now, sometime in the future.
For now, some
non-test activity, or battling the weather.
[Not at a]
pinnacle of some decision or other.
“Haint”
blue, whispers of taint, it is and it ain’t,
what taints, is tainted.
Psychics who are
right.
A list of
metaphors for building something.
The city and the
city’s lair.
All lives have
battle sections.
Definition of the
one and only in horticultural terms.
“They handed us over to it/and we were alone.”
The battle scene
leads to the Arcadian scene.
The animals,
pilgrims, defeated, supplicants, bushes, virtue,
an antidote. The
domens, a joke, a centipede, morass.
A beast, a lair.
Apathetic wondering.
An unnamable coherence.
Love’s crescendo,
but inside a fermata.
Fear’s wall; a
depression.
A man walking his
dog with a dog ball launcher,
and I say, “That
man is walking alone holding a single flower.”
A bird is screeching
outside my window. I ask, “What is that?”
He says, “An eagle.”
“No
center, only the circuit”
“I’ll Wait for You Until the End of Time like
Everybody Else”
No part for you
in the play.
Crashing water
systems.
Supertankers,
cotillions.
Tone-leading
structures leading us no one knows where.
Stiff-kneed, a stiff
one needed, or a few provisions later,
the momentary
stopover.
“We make it up as
we go along.”
Seeing what
everyone else sees
for what it was, and that it was a charade.
Knowledge not guarded as much as it is carried.
No tigers, just
paper-thin characters “revived,”
a wider
denouement. The forces we forgot,
low-lit in the
back with the torn wallpaper,
move further back
into the shadows, altar to the sun.
“Too late for pie.”
Writing verbatim
lines in the wrong order.
Nature taunts
you, but you only know
what it’s doing because
it’s done it before,
will do it again,
so you just wait thorough
for the next one.
What is beginning
is what is
disappearing. Confabulation
of waiting.
Erosion, ice melt, the reduction of land to an island.
Every day is like
Wednesday. Hump day
you never get over, so you write lists, write list
poems, write your
unhappiness, sort out the living
that must be got, or must be given, that which keeps
the rest of us disconnected, the board barrier diverting
traffic. You
disconnect.
Outsider’s guilt.
Your misery is my
breath, my misery your breath.
Barely worn,
hardly on. Those who can tell what’s coming.
List
of vegetation. List of endangered animals. List of flavors.
Like Christ’s
still here, like a leap’s still drifting on. As if all
you want is your
heart scorched, but no one will give it to you.
Notes:
Lines in quotes are taken from John Ashbery’s “Flowchart,” unless stated otherwise.
Italicized lines are from or inspired by Marthe Reed’s posthumously published “Ark Hive.”
Lines that are
both italicized and in quotes are also from John Ashbery’s “Flowchart,” but
italicized in his text.
