Sam Truitt



Demand = Becoming

If it sleeps     it has a lair  :  if it breathes it leaves a corpse 
to lie in dreaming     of a place 
                                                             closed by walls with windows 
to look out & guard &     open on a spring morning 
with a wife & child & cat in a bed     you share
—a fate—a place you make good—
call it good to be to     live to grasp these tantalized 
                                                          tangible facts dynamic 
diadem hedge “dom” in     any style head space bodies 
prowl free to form unicorn     white light against steel 
moth     against the edge of 
                                                       the frame that is a fact

there is no coming back from the picture at the edge

of that loss that is un-     utterable after all we 
have seen & gleamed to     surround end     
be before     everything flows     through     nothing    
                                is separate    is     so near it all

Boogie Woogie

The shape of the word hits the so     & 
so & so & out                  the hard cold
direct experience  fact of the matter is
frame shifts we can only describe
what it is not         become  us waiting 
be     not process as monster that
pulls phrase apart   heavy mutter drip-
from point of everything   ping matted            
to gain closer touch     to go inside                     
                                                   risen forward
we can never know
the sphere dividing           we carry/care
of space horizons               fire awhile &
as beauty combustion             then hand it 
blindness twisting & brilliant & traveling                  
                                                              on a part of 
                                                               us wrent in it

The Bridge of Awe Over the River of Wide Awakening

                                        an interval     a distant     
melody of discourse     in period of human time 

what hangs off & binds     hinges only what hang     
stars bind how to say     thing is the thing wove     
to come always back     to horsed man in the tree     

only the sky     
                          brief clearing of night full of moon at 
                                                                 apex of snow 
flung through the houses          
                                                   no branches only what 
hangs     what we are held in is beheld     in     
but to be in words     bits of broken glass with-
out     grasp     every line a line through it up
the steps of symmetry with-     out singing     
“as though it is disappearing” 

This Is Actually Happening

mold man mummy man     rapture man muffin man 
writing through     Caliban in the time  I can break
off—crumble     in my hand 
                                                       of this island meaning sound
I cannot make you see or be or x or inexorably 
leaps fate a flabby hole     ground by bit of data

it’s a small change (ground     clockwise) 
to say everything & leave you nothing 
but intervals to open to close on 
“you must govern yourself” meaning difference 
between good art & bad art & you see I see 
we all see shit     imagination hurts    
to hold inside image hurts     collision hurts 
meeting that interrupts the text bursts 
under tyranny deprived     of this island meaning sound

Sam Truitt is the author of Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (Station Hill, 2011); Vertical Elegies: Three Works (UDP, 2008); Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia, 2003); and Anamorphosis Eisenhower (Lost Roads, 1998). He is the recipient of a 2011 Howard Fellowship, two Fund for Poetry grants and the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Series Award from the University of Georgia. He holds a BA from Kenyon College, an MFA from Brown University, and a PhD from SUNY-Albany. He teaches in Bard College’s Language and Thinking Workshop. For more, visit www.samtruitt.org.
 
 
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