In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight,
and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines
almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened
forehead, in case all of the day — its woods and play, its fire —
has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight
drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart's muscle —
... well. I am filled with snow. There's nothing to do now
but wait.
They billow from a hillside in Cha’ am.
Together, they are more than plural:
the planet’ s darkest song, a tongue,
a serpent muscling air apart,
a dire banner come unfurled,
a river flowing wholly from
the old, mute mountain’ s desperate heart,
the last confession of the world.
Geof Huth
More About Visual Poetry >>
Brutal to give
the prisoner a window —
a blue sky glimpse —
as if an afterlife
existed. Brutal
for you to parade
in a body
in the same
room where I dream you.
If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock
how else would eternity
find its way around
Sheets entangle him
Naked on his bed
Like a toppled mast
Slack sails bedeck
At sea, no ballast
For that even keel
He cannot keep —
No steering wheel
As he falls asleep
Ghost I house
In this old flat —
Your outpost —
My aftermath
Fellow fugitive
Forgive yourself
And me thereby
Thus we can live
Whatever’ s left
Of time for us,
Each day a gift
We take on trust
A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut.
Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
