20090108

Geof Huth


Five Vigesima


99 and 44/100% Sure

Fog hanging in air | or descending snow | the sky white | against
itself | against the ridge | everything assimilated into everything
else | I cannot see | the deer on the road by the stream
in the woods | A dance brought about by spinning | hitting the air
the air | the air | the bark | Pieces of mudflap and splashbar, deer
weaves itself back into woods | Fingertinglingly in thought
and place | The zeugma of everyday life | from a long line of cars
but now I only hear | chittering squirrels nagging from the branches
the siren that rings | in silent places | a dark dripping blood from
the car | The pomander | studded with cloves | dries into a husk
manifest memory | the list of every passenger of my life | Lily
and lea | lie before us like a land of dreams | Fumbling in the glove
compartment for a finger | of hope | The moon lies fair | and far away
That dark instrument | a car | with tremulous cadence slow | and bring
it back | its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar | There is a way
out of twilight | the forest contains | this entire volume | of earth
of itself | the limits of measure | so various, so beautiful, so new
Damp and trodden | the muddy stones | a cobble of repairs
hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light | but an Oppenness
the last vespers | everything broken held together in my hands



and Trenton

I go to work in my extra-medium shirt and tie | and order
an extra-large medium-small latte | on a decidedly daily day
where I read my extra-ordinary email | Outside a big star shines
(it appears to have no name) | onto a now-white world | we are
powerless in the face of reality | Simultaneous with thought is
the running of thought out | as insurance against interminable
thinking | blankness before whiteness | Snowwise, we are
doing well | the largest moon of the night | is the front lawn
of each of our homes | If I type a word onto a screen | If I find
a way to type a particular word onto the white page of the screen
then there is a word | there| one that represents a thought
though one as aphysical as any thought | it seems evanescent
a spectral presence visible but not palpable | but it exists
in memory | in a physical space | as thought resides in brain
lodged inside a particularly tight and gooey crevice | It seems
and | thus | it is | Down the dark alley | a voice travels and,
traveling, says | “Niggers and ne’er-do-wells, stay away!”
We survey the fickle night | trying to see the voice | yet
all we hear is the voice repeated | So we figure this is how we
live each evening away in pieces | in Schenectady | and Trenton



In Place of “in lieu of”

When it is night | it is never night | when it is night | it is never
the streetlights humming through the snow coming down upon
Ours is an oolongphaeic imagination | and so is theirs | As we
shovel the white snow greying in dusky evening | they rest above
us in the branches of maples | in thorny branches of black locusts
passed down | in the childhood of us | Africa and the ritual of it
the termite storm blackening the skies | because ours is also
an oolongphaeic reality | termites as air as wind as rain as
they seep through the sliding glass doors | through the jalousies
that divide the outdoors into slices | From the trees’ branches
they look down upon us shoveling the white away | with their eyes
colored night | their black bodies | each is the darkest part of night
a hundred crows in one maple | a hundred crows in the other
intermittent twittering | but a continuing chorus | caaa | caaa | caaa
They are the black leaves of the bare trees | as we move below them
moving white | they shuffle in their perch | they watch us working
with their black eyes in their black heads in the black night | they switch
places in pairs | from tree to tree across the oolongphaeic alleyway
When we open a door | they flutter into storm | breaking air into pieces
a thunder of rising | always rising | as we listen to them watching us



Eye Formation

Complacent each morning | to the command of the sun
a gutter full of leaves | the cold white candle of daybreak
each window cracked enough | to allow movement from without
the peignoirs she reserved for Sunday | or a dress that was
nothing but zippers and pockets | a lock of her hair stuffed
in her book as a bookmark | marking where she had been
Precision mechanisms | precision Swiss mechanisms
make this poem run | this poem is a precision timepiece
it counts the space between | line one and line twenty
When she first saw it | she knew | of that old catastrophe
a thing to be cherished | She couldn’t wash her face without
washing her nose | and her head hung heavy in that
perfect sky | in that that was all she knew | The words
she saw were it | the visible hear | the way she swallowed
the word swallow when she said it |the words, ambiguous
undulations heading outward |her eyes cast downward
to darkness | There was always a sound within it before
it ruptured |the children called it eradicate | the sound of circles
What our writing says | about ourselves | and what we think
our writing says about ourselves | says about ourselves



A Ruminating Beast

I’m a homophobe | I’m afraid of the same thing | I wanted
to write a funny poem | but my dog ate my homework | It was
like a pustule | only juicier | My doctor told me I had sycosis
I asked him how to spell it | it might be a crazy thought but I
worried it might be a bad thing | My dog smells like bacalhau
which is the only thing that keeps | me from eating him | with a little
chianti | or a Pomeranian | It was the best of days | a cold wind blew
through me like | the azure winding of a watch | She told me
my penis was the nicest she had ever seen | which I appreciated until
she referred to it as a pencil | Do you ever wonder if the reason we are here
is just to keep the world | going for the cockroaches? | I wouldn’t
say I’m a vain man | but I can tell you what way the wind is blowing
I would consider myself a failure | except I hate agreeing with
my father | Why can’t Ashbery even spell his name correctly?
God asked me why I didn’t believe in him | I told him because
his work has never lived up to its promise | and I feared he might be
a Republican | He gave me two hockey sticks for Christmas | telling me
that was only half my gift | When I step out of the shower and stride across
the floor | I call out, “Nude man walking!” | And the waters part
If it weren’t for longing | my penis wouldn’t shoot straight at all


 
 
 
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1 Comments:

Blogger Raymond Farr said...

hauntingly haltingly
from mundane to specific
& back thru
wierd sometimes
to look in

1:46 AM  

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