Bill Freind


March

As always, it seemed like a braking situation. Where was the hoped for vanishing? Every floor was a blithe denial, anyone’s provision steeping in the inadequate light. A peep for the founders beyond replay They emerge limed, calling for an origin they would have placed. We await with fingers in our mouth, a clatter from across the street. I wouldn’t say merely. No flag among abolished shelves.



Obsolete Apocalypse

Once, that certainty of sudden heaven –
a morning amid the bran flakes
and passable shame, then a lifting up,
the present sundered.
The dented Camry remains below, bills
drifting across the patchy lawn
as neighbors gawk in their dailiness.
Blank eternity a cheery, unpunctuated pronto.
That wiping clean in null freedom.

Now each minute dances
then whirls archaic
all exits arcing back to waiting rooms,
prolegomena on eternal loop. Instants pile,
novelties age and exit sheepishly.
Disheveled tongues,
expiration dates on a cracked screen.
The wait for the unveiling becomes
the wish for the veil.
And yet the obsolete lingers presently
the fruit almost eastered. The obsolete remains.
There is never any now. Only the end ends.



Flora and Fauna of Southern New Jersey

Verbose warbler. Wild pear. Lesser crested nuthatch. Swamp begonia. Slotted fir. Mottled shoobie. Laggard finch. Slack-shouldered deer. Belgian celery. Backward-facing moth. Stink moss. Serous footed plover. Nesting maggot. Ruby-finned wrasse. Squat-nosed vole. Widow’s grass. Orphan’s grass. Trilling koi. Dead man’s lace.




Bill Freind is the author of two collections of poetry: American Field Couches (BlazeVox, 2008) and An Anthology (housepress, 2000). He has had recent work in Noon: A Journal of the Short Poem, Journal of Poetics Research, Perversely, and others. He's also a contributing editor at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars.
 
 
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