Stranger. Adam Clay
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or considering companionship seems
too studious or perhaps
even too stubborn
for someone
as careful as yourself. This pathway
pardons care, but what you have
when you’re all free of care
and gardens makes
as much sense
as where you began.
America’s farmlands haunt your syntax,
your sense of being, or at least
the filter between an object and your notion of
what it means
to exist as an object.
To be ablaze inside the color blue like a fixed identity
is to place a word
over here and another word there beneath
the first. This life maintains
its level of supposing so stoically
that you would think intention had given birth to it.
The End Time Before the End Time
Whatever an elegy’s opposite might be,
the river outlasted the city
before this one,
old enough to know what should arrive
downstream and what should sink.
In anything’s undoing,
we might imagine some notion of ourselves
but to what end does our mind direct us?
The throat manages its urges
for abandonment
with a mix of care and attention.
Like departing and arriving each morning
without much thought, luckily our bodies make
most decisions for us.
Even a Straight Line Must Curve to Shape the World
The fire it almost starts itself
Looks like water comes from somewhere else
—KURT WAGNER
My thoughts lost each day
in whatever linear pattern
appears at my disposal,
as if blaming the light
of noon for a midnight terror
wouldn’t be nearly enough
recklessness for all or any
of us. On Short Street,
the steeples repair themselves
into a more fashionable
version of church: rhinestones
and glitter, retired pennies
cover all seeable spaces.
In my version of the future,
there’s no need for disrepair,
no need for scaffolding,
no need for rerouting a river
up to the surface. Downtown
of yesterday and the stones
remain in the memory
like reminders of blocking
out the past. My mind
in these moments wants
to return to the linear, wants
to string a thread from here
to there in such a way that you
would think it had always
been there. At times here the seasons
feel fake, the summer’s patience
only constructed for the sake
of violence and the sake of sustaining
our voices into the fluid corners
of night. Eventually terrorism
will look something like a truckload
of men driving through this quaint downtown,
plowing over parking meters,
resisting all attempts to monetize
what little open space we have left.
Of course our sense of terrorism will have
to adapt—perhaps even you will find
another use for your spare change?
Most things don’t make sense
until they make sense—the birds
wash up in piles, their talons and beaks
the only evidence of what they
once were. In the next minute
you’re skipping rocks across
the glass of a lake,
the sky so blue that ice
could fall right out of it.
No matter how hard I try,
I find myself returning back
to a logical way of organizing
everything, and I wonder
if I could recognize
madness in its current
river of form? A day on loan
can still be a type of day, the way
the light declines moment by moment,
and we witness the sky moving
away from the earth, a wreath of light
like a vision, like a weariness so divine.
Upper Peninsula
A bronze sky at first seemed the best way
to describe it,
but later the description
fell away into something
more vapid or mundane
than one might expect,
although the sky did not.
Your feet doubted the land.
Even a lawn chair
falling from the heavens
would have made more sense,
and even falling asleep while standing upright
felt more natural than this.
What we are is cut into the ground and continues
to burrow absentmindedly
into the source of our birth.
A shipwreck for every misguided
thought. A sandstone skipped across the water
ceases to dwell within
its