Geof Huth


from [Bracket Title]

(book 3 of he is beckettt from the book sequence entitled be, comma, to)

                               —to Tom Beckett

Which mention of the breath
Of your left cheek

Did you remember on the weekend
You saw, for part of a second, that stray

White dog that marched
Down the alley, regal and

Unswayed by age, new testament
To the meanings of the marks

Sprayed on garage doors in paints
Of many, and sometimes unnamed, colors?


     ^


Were there options you considered,
Or statements to that effect you suppressed,
That seemed, only after the fact,
To be inevitable, even though they never
Materialized (the incarnation of deities
And destinies) or were even passed to another
As if some offering to
A gently dying god?


     ^


Where in the reticulated curves of your memory,
fat with significance, did you think you could keep it?


     ^


Could you figure from the radiator
Beginning to hiss and the whistle that came
From between your teeth that
You could hear the sound of something breathing
In the next room? and was it the smell
Of bacon frying and the whiff of that lavender
Hand lotion that made your realize you had to change
The baby’s diaper? and would you have
Understood that you didn’t need that piece
Of the puzzle if you hadn’t’ve been overwhelmed
By the children’s blocks tumbling
Out of the closet?


     ^


When else could you have expected to’ve done
What you imagined you had done, except in the evening
As the swallows came home, pouring down the funnel of
Themselves into that gaping chimney, an abandoned
Mouth to the dead brown earth; except in the morning
When a sliver of sun first slipped through your open window,
First light and a gasp like waking or the wrench of apnea,
How you wake each night fifty times, once for each year you’ll
Die in your life, and then the sheet curled tightly around
Your neck to keep out your eye’s breath; except
In the afternoon when the river slid away, a caravan of water
Pushing everything down and everything out, and a single
Hawk glided on an upswing current until its eyes told it
To drop onto the bloody body of a rabbit nibbling; except
Whenever you were asleep, dropping down a shaft and
The grip you couldn’t make, pursued down a corridor to a
Corridor to a way not out, and the rope around your neck,
Or a tightening hand, as you almost made it around the corner,
And away into a marsh unnaturally warm with everything
Rotting within it and falling away, until you almost remembered
You didn’t live in a dream; except when you were awake?



Geof Huth's book ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth was published by if p then q of Manchester, England, in March of 2010. He writes almost daily about matters poetical, visual and otherwise, at his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics.

 
 
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