Raymond Farr



The Water’s Loquacious Edge

A mile off
I can see the sulfur piles

Hart Crane lamented
Once like clouds

Holes the silver trees
Of his eyes could

Climb into—the flammable
Question marks

Of his eyes digging at
The water’s loquacious edge—

A house sinking broadside
Mid-afternoon

One edge slower
Windows like a shambles

Of impatience
                The perfect

Romance of a view
With Nothingness


…iron horse, etc

& like heresy in a field
Of cheesy frontier metaphors

I move around town
Squirting milk from a shotgun

—an iron horse, etc
& someone says “Pause here…

& I’ll cut you!” & we live & die
On a street with seven STOP signs

& I’m sitting up all night
In a chair full of rat babies

& according to Cy Twombly
The dog’s made of coffee

Left over from lunch today
& I’m singing the song of

A wavelength that can
Never be measured



A Fiddle Too Large for a Rooster

& dragging
A fiddle

Too large
For a rooster

To hold
Quietly

Against
The red

Horizon
Of its cheek

The egg plant
Of Social

Darwinism
Is all over

The 2
Feathery

Faces
Of the metaphor

The broken
Mirror

Of my life
Has become

& I’m all like
Music

Limned
In the ice house

Of a once
Grand

Civilization—
NOT!



The Naked Woman of a Hillside

We are reminded
That we live in a park

As in a memory—
Telephone poles of the world 

Jutting out imaginary maps—
                       & the milt 

Of a steel mill 4 miles on 
The bay’s other side…

Let’s just say we live 
On a street twining

Down the naked 
Woman of a hillside

                  Let’s just say 
The bridge these clouds 

All walk on, is built 
Out of sentences



The One-armed Girl & the “Missing Hand” Job

         I was promised a glimpse of pure morning 
But running away wasn’t something I was offered— 

Not even a rhetorical gesture!
& so I shuffled the facts alertly in the quarantined light

& swallowed the dark throat of this mad mental health dude 
& grinned like I was getting even
 
                         There were voices in my head cheering me on 
I told them a one-armed girl gave me a “missing hand” job once 

So they held me for observation on a psyche admit 24 hours—
Untreatable silent men wishing a black disease on me

                                                         It was like one of these 
Nut jobs had scratched How impossible a winter daffodil! 

On the common room wall in what looks like my hand writing 
& now I can’t get Elvis Costello mumbling the lyrics to 

All This Useless Beauty out of my head 

Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), sic transit—“g” (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012, 2016), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com.
 
 
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