Sunday, September 15, 2019

Rob Gourley

Poly Waterline Repair

An Earthworm escaping
the disturbance
to its soggy clot of rootlets
in this arid canyon bottom,

While I was excavating
more of the waterline
with a clamshovel & trowel
to find my troubling leak,

Was an encouraging sign —
that I might be moments away
from locating the two-inch gash
which has caused frustrating delay,

Day after day, until now.

Sunday, June 9, 2019

Lewis Gesner

A most luminous book by Lewis Gesner  > !



file:///C:/Users/Karla/Downloads/New-England-Suite%20(2).pdf



Sunday, May 12, 2019

Joel Chace



Heave


Be sure & get a decent-looking chap of 16 years old

or more. If you can also buy a beautiful

Circassian woman for $2000, do so

if you think best; or if you can hire one or two

at reasonable prices, do so if you think they are

pretty and will pass for Circassian slaves.  Prayer-rot

lines every conversion’s curse.  One’s work in the world  --  

an office, desk, in a room, ceiling high and white; screens,

messages to pass along; messages make meanings; letters,

one letter at a time placed, hung on a hook of its own,

such black against such white.  Herod dines inside

collusion’s hearse.  But these others fit in nowhere and keep

trying to come back, to say they don’t deserve twenty

mortal murders, not they, who always kept consciences

clear though half believing prophecies.  We drink, we

eat, we surfeit, we curse, we play, we dance,

we whore, faster in limbo than ever.









Incandescence


The one leaving and the one staying.  The one leaving

shifts, blurs, and returns, shifted, blurred.  Part of the one

having left is left behind, or a small something is brought

back.  The one having stayed must revise, must, because both

must eat.  Inhabiting has to be a truth; permission

has to be allowed.  Eyes meeting, pulling clarity

from another’s mind.  It is in the nature of reason

to perceive things under a certain form of

eternity.  Inadequate and confused ideas
follow by the same necessity as adequate
or clear and distinct ideas.  The case of language, you see,

is different; for when by the help of grammar we assign

the letters alpha or beta, or any other

letters to a certain name, then, if we add, or

subtract, or misplace a letter, the name which is

written is not only written wrongly, but not written

at all; and in any of these cases becomes other

than a name.  Beneath the father’s fingers, his daughter’s

forearms.  He barely squeezes to find her little bones,

small as a maple’s topmost branches, that network of twigs

mirroring the network of roots tousling out far into

dark soil.  They reach and thin themselves, becoming silky

nebulae of tiniest filaments floating nearly free,

laved in an element more water, air, or something nameless

that will caress her hair and fine light of her bones when

they are no longer his, nor even hers.