Stranger. Adam Clay
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of Where We Are
Plainly spoken, I am responding to you.
Despite our best efforts to will it shut,
the proof of the world’s existence
can best be seen in its insistence,
in its opening up. Should we get lost,
let us be lost in a familiar space, surrounded
by every motion of the unnamed and unseen
until the moment they appear. With the sofa
in a slightly different place this morning,
the room resembles a dream of the room:
the details remain present and realistic
while everything bends toward one wall
in particular. I know what you want,
but the wind will not concern itself with us.
Northern Lights
Light or even a phrase or two
erased from the mind
like a once familiar street razed:
buildings destroyed, moved
elsewhere, tucked into the folds
of a tornado (you hope)—
One thinks many times not burdened by
but along with the clock—
Of course, it’s a pleasure to arrive most anywhere
these days filled with desire
but once the mind’s dwelling place becomes an ice cave
love defines its own tributaries with pine needles
or another way to say let’s only speak
in the absolutes of morning, free of comparison,
of a drifting scale tipped to an almost perfect balance:
none of that language needed now
between meals, between the future departing from disaster,
and once the mind slows to the point of regression,
then what to make of the first memory arrived upon or within
for you what would it be and know
you cannot know what it would be for others—
Even in their telling
there’s an orbit of masquerade around which no moon
could ever exist nor would it want to,
no perfect circle or symmetry to dwell within:
once the trees did not need their names and the night
needed no voice, it needed no knot
to unravel, it needed no one
to explain its madness to
Disruption Without Shrapnel
An admission of a river’s deviation from whatever path
aligned to the stars, you clip a word from the mind
until it forms its own kind of mind:
a curtain meant to protect nothing, no castle of sky
creeping into view.
And what of the morning?
The newspaper troubles whatever glow
defined by the light.
Don’t worry or wonder—
the world contains enough rubble
for the weight of every
body and for the weight of every body
we might imagine a space filled and emptied
again. In denying yourself
you deny a crucial part of the storm.
Along the Edge of a Season
Distant roads brought together
in a way described
as anything but pliant. Instead it seems
normalcy might suggest a stifled inspiration
destined to exist
as a hallway exists:
hidden between the rooms,
the Iowa of a house,
the Tuesday in a week with no Wednesday.
Somewhere a truck
does not turn over. It seems
there are no middles
anywhere—there are only
logical lists in sensible places.
Perhaps calling my view
of the world palindromic suggested
you wanted a window to work
both ways, that you
wanted coffee to put you to sleep.
Disregard the snowbanks in your mind.
Remember that ice expands
as it freezes—its memory doesn’t
defer to urgency or to what
we desire. Snow
and legs keep moving through
the world listlessly. So much
for floorboards. So much for
absence that I once admired
or even desired as if
the world was in my shirt pocket
waiting to unfold
and scatter into the space between
the two of us. You suggested a shadow
could be musical
or that the neck of a giraffe mimics
the way some trees
stretch toward the sky,
free of knots and free of
the mark of history
upon them. It’s easier to say
the word quaint than to be that way.
Was your attempt at sensibility
a worthy one? I don’t know.
I don’t know how to place the weight of a breath
behind the eyes. Money is a strange sort of memory:
remember the market with nothing for sale?
Remember how we corresponded
for a month straight with words
corrupted from their meanings?
An ashtray wasn’t anymore.
Arbitration became so apparent
that suddenly knowledge (even a thought)
ceased to be incredible.