Harrison Fisher


Feels of Dissolving Fact




True gentlemen 
of self-placement, 
today’s lassitude and mine
feel like a match.


I get up, I stub my toe on the kitchen table
—Ow, ow, I’ve killed myself—


I become engrossed in things:



               ⸾⸾ 



Plasma tributes of yonder and old, 
bean dolphin equals dolphin fly, 
coots tootling from the far point, 
polyploids turning Flashcards
down in the hollow, stuff upon stuff—


My tea steams beside me.



               ⸾⸾


                                                
I disturb underfoot
the obliquity of the ecliptic.


Through crystal ball 
distortions of the iris,


an eye looks out 
from its quietus.


I see the Bay of Bengal,
the Falling-Bird Heat.



               ⸾⸾ 



Should we believe
in only one of any 
one thing—


one snowflake pattern 
distinct from all others, 


one accident 
of evolution on earth
that leads to Homo sapiens,


my one and only?   
                                                                                                                 


               ⸾⸾ 



And how does a slime mold 
know anything, find food, or travel
without wasted exploration?
 

Lite muse, en garde (!) . . .



“and tell the ravisher of my soul
 I perish for her love.”*




_________

*Thomas Campion




               ⸾⸾ 




               Well past the hubris of youth, I open a can of tuna and a dolphin’s 
eye—as sudden as first praises—being eaten by flukes looks blankly out 
at me.

                                                                                                           



               Outside, the racket—
noisy kids and bass from cars and arguments spilling out front doors, ever-
barking dogs, and I who cannot sleep at night and only want to, and cannot
sleep and only want to	
	


               ⸾⸾ 



peer out on huge crickets
like automobiles 
on the depopulate hillside, 
vertiginous landscape,
little stores 
that have never seen
browsers or buyers.





When I next touch the teacup, it is cold clod.




               ⸾⸾ 



                                                                    
Here 
are streamers on my lawn, 
and gauds.
A clock radio 
shaped like a clown.



As always,
a single shoe, 
busted off its sole.



More—
torn bags and 
things hard to decipher:
the unexpected leavings of the world
lain before me.

Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real (2000). After a long hiatus from writing and publishing, he has new poems appearing in 2023 in Amsterdam Review, Apocalypse Confidential, Jersey Devil Press, Ligeia, Misfitmagazine, #Ranger, and several other online publications.

 
 

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