Rusty Morrison
AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS
What sway in the noncommittal elm.
Gathered into my empty basket a wicker sky.
A crow, scissoring its call, clips the downward fall from my fiction of completion.
Do our senses imbricate to offer us a wing of ascent?
Succor of leaf-sound in the branches, each movement remaking shelter.
I see a progressive acceleration in the colors of sunset tonight, until it is stillness that disappears.
How to feel when roots break through the underside of my idea of them?
I pitch my listening to the tone of ivy growing.
Each leaf merely repeats, will not remain with me in the present.
AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS
Dour in the millpond, the material hours, built up on force alone.
The moth pushes and the sky falls down around it.
In the soft of redwood’s bark are deep furrows narrow enough for a serpent in sunlight to suggest itself.
Thicket of weeds and dwarf oak did not admit me into its filament though from a distance I saw how it incandesced.
Needing only one hand for balance on the dry marsh’s steep bed, my other hand couldn’t help but tear idly at the last growth of delicately tufted sedge.
Make a paste of ash, then paint out to the edges. Of what prophesy? When bindweed will spray silver-backed into blossom.
Lay down the idea of cathedral upon the redwood grove, as if this were accomplishment.
Sexed it with the crackle of leaves fallen.
So do I think to widen my imaginary surplus.
AN INTERSECTION OF LEAVES NOT LIKENESS
To value withering, I call it condensed light.
In the keep of mists is condensed distance.
Figuration is only the flower-head of a less visible frequency.
Where have I left its leaves this time?
When I’m steeped in flower stalk, uterine wall, tree-lined glade, humming is a way to avoid looking up or down.
Concocted my meadow foxtail.
Too quickly I pinnate each floating with the hyperbole of flight.
I could create slur, but neither birth nor cessation, in the stalks of late summer’s grasses.
Sunlight so easily abolishes philosophy.
An international literary journal from 1984 to 2018, Verse now administers the Tomaž Šalamun Prize.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Friday, December 07, 2007
NEW! Poem by Brian Lucas
Brian Lucas
FROND VAULT
Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages. The flotation a person settles is an ear in sound where appearances give us their all. Bringing focus to the flagstones, early morning walk and I’m doing nothing. The hole where lights are seen. Star in a vise so we experience headache. This gives us the brightness we reflect onto others—faces yet to be grown, the walk still needing to be taken, another imprint on awareness. Things don’t begin the way they used to—if we gaze into linear reverse we see that death has preceded us.
···
Arena pieces in electric city maw. Behold my hand, itself a sinister word, an invention marred by its own relation to departures: giving the boat a push, counting down, a wave farewell… See you when the arena is rebuilt, I’ll say my first word then.
···
He had never once used those words, nor even learned to handle the instrument that would’ve made their written form possible. The words in question were discovered in a volume formed in concentrically rippling circles, flat like a sundial. Between each letter there rose (or was it emanated?) a fragrance that could be seen by those standing at a slight angle to the page. The curls and indentations this fragrance left in the air was enough to cause the onlookers to be paralyzed. If all hallucinations could be true, and not only a matter of physiological perspective, the world and its words would be held captive by a possibility of olfactory interpretations and reinterpretations lying over the seasons like a palimpsest of the brain’s canals during monsoon.
···
A cloak of linen, the back of a hand, a falling through space shows what musculature has given us over the years, years spent listening to the walls of a room that speak with an exhaling known to grant favors. An adherence symmetry avoids, feeling pitched to a previously unknown elevation. The dandruff of stars because they are a desert breed, something we didn’t mind shouldering at the time. Not like the weight that accompanies expeditions like these—quietly in a house of sonorous doors and thresholds opening onto amber hills where caretakers divine water with crossed eyes.
···
Inside my body is an anti-body.
FROND VAULT
Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages. The flotation a person settles is an ear in sound where appearances give us their all. Bringing focus to the flagstones, early morning walk and I’m doing nothing. The hole where lights are seen. Star in a vise so we experience headache. This gives us the brightness we reflect onto others—faces yet to be grown, the walk still needing to be taken, another imprint on awareness. Things don’t begin the way they used to—if we gaze into linear reverse we see that death has preceded us.
···
Arena pieces in electric city maw. Behold my hand, itself a sinister word, an invention marred by its own relation to departures: giving the boat a push, counting down, a wave farewell… See you when the arena is rebuilt, I’ll say my first word then.
···
He had never once used those words, nor even learned to handle the instrument that would’ve made their written form possible. The words in question were discovered in a volume formed in concentrically rippling circles, flat like a sundial. Between each letter there rose (or was it emanated?) a fragrance that could be seen by those standing at a slight angle to the page. The curls and indentations this fragrance left in the air was enough to cause the onlookers to be paralyzed. If all hallucinations could be true, and not only a matter of physiological perspective, the world and its words would be held captive by a possibility of olfactory interpretations and reinterpretations lying over the seasons like a palimpsest of the brain’s canals during monsoon.
···
A cloak of linen, the back of a hand, a falling through space shows what musculature has given us over the years, years spent listening to the walls of a room that speak with an exhaling known to grant favors. An adherence symmetry avoids, feeling pitched to a previously unknown elevation. The dandruff of stars because they are a desert breed, something we didn’t mind shouldering at the time. Not like the weight that accompanies expeditions like these—quietly in a house of sonorous doors and thresholds opening onto amber hills where caretakers divine water with crossed eyes.
···
Inside my body is an anti-body.