Jac Nelson



And What Do We Find There?
(Or, Two Aspects of Encountering the World)

[                ]:
a staircase,
a mezzanine,
a place, a definite place,
location,
landmark,
fencepost, any other of many kinds of posts
(signpost,
lamppost,
telegraph post),
something a person can touch with his hand,
which he can later claim to have touched with his hand,
which he can give directions toward,
so that a family member might go and touch it too.
tending to be a singular noun, maybe
one that is a name for something we’d say
                     isn’t living.
a house, a pasture.
a train, an automobile.
a steak, a highball.
a nightclub, an alley.
                               [an alley?]

next, [                ]:
words don’t accomplish this task,

                     which is,

turn abstract
                     to matter.
instead words
are white
out.
for example:
I thought I just saw someone in the kitchen.
I thought I heard someone say my name.
You were in my dream last night.
The pipes are knocking in the hall.

render: render: render:

With Dynamite an art museum is a temporary curative. and deli sandwiches, seltzer, observe people cycling the mainway. coldcut / decalcify master / crudités nobody wants to pinch you hard or make you squint. But the windy boats with their anchors sunk in super deposition, and wounded, the tuna, like the nail-biting clergy, whipping, migrating, whiffling, a fraternalia, a prize-walk. ground / boned expression / three sheets as long as you’re working this might be tied down. But I was in a park. I was in Central Square. I was the center of a vast circle. I was circumscribing the knowable, with dynamite. control / feral A lathe worked me like cherry, I was shavings and dust, I was a bowl, I was a twelve-bore, we were mitochondria in our great-grandmothers, we were miniscule, the hypnos of water co-temporal, picking over an alley behind the wax museum.                 [cf. “belief” “normal” “firearm” “tool” “science” “language”]

Tinbergen’s Four Questions

the biologist’s sleep is a light sleep

the wind which rouses her is a late runner

gleaming with orange nightpaint


our desire for knowledge
hangs from the eaves of houses
at night ringing

our desire for knowledge is musical
I hear it ringing in the night

the biologist has a bell metal

it strikes bronze questions into the solar system

taut tower of birds
taut philosophers’ ears
taut timpani of desires

roaming the passageways of the body:
organs, tissue, cells, matrices, proteins

our desire for knowledge is appetitive
we would gorge ourselves

micro cosmos
macro anthropos

our
                                                                                           filling emptying baskets of apples
desire
                                                                                           empties out like milk from the amphora

becomes nothing

[desire for sex
desire for chocolate and wine
desire some pinnacle, the whole world
trees, water
living, breathing
some whole system of living and breathing things]


a certain pure desire

which floods like a milkbath



Jac Nelson likes to read other people’s poems out loud. Some poems appear in c_L, Homunculus, and Peaches & Bats. One in particular received honorable mention for the Mary Barnard Academy of American Poets Prize. In Portland OR, Jac spends time translating the works of St. Kassiani – a 9th-century poet, musician and nun in Constantinople – and reading poetry out loud to sporting loved ones.

 
 
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