hobart logo
Four Poems  photo

Fragrance

I never lost what I had out of eye    the piano minded surplus or acheless weather    what ever the
          night still oily with a personality is          there is no sense          prior even still nothing
has a

drum beat or has magma in each fold like the night has          few

are free of blame and full of power     the bed smell is holy     the woman, a sledgehammer of
        pressed lightscraps        in repose, would never anticipate relief from anything other than
demolition

Who is she?          She carries you on limns around the depressed colors that make up the
instrument, the sky

How could she sleep?     The question unclasps orbit like a necklace    lays it on the counter
dinner plates rinsed of any labor poetics       I never lost my memory and I always put two

and two together

I could always understand the cutting     boards damp smell from years of lunch making, tomato
in the wood grain

longing has no     route it spreads     an oil stain, comfortable, vulnerable     slowly as the
bed smells I wane and lose even loss     go into lunar debt to cut off something that
lives by its

fragrance like that     in the warm water of her personal night and there I really    am holding   
           a crying chant and a bell flaring at once

 

 

Spar

In time we are an earring in the snow, lost and only reflecting a massive territory of light. I wish I could play out anywhere what the amount is, but the wrong tool is always dented even with an impressive spherical odometer. It is only possible to spar with singular cuts of time boxed in the ring. To know what is required of you at one minute is not what is required of you at the next, and to abide by strategy, however slack, atrophies your muscle. If we shout at the obstacle. Or, admire our calves in the moonlight interbellum, maybe we can climb the towering ephemera piled and piled so high that it pokes through to heaven. I drink cup after cup of all of our impulsive sound so much so that my liver collapses. Let it collapse. We do not want to move or be taken anywhere. We do not want to begin the movement anywhere.

 

 

Octave

I gagged the erotic octave buried in my pelvis. It leapt out unwinding in a petal catastrophe. Saved by collecting doubt like twigs to make a little fragile house and flash whatever punitive precision with being only kind of gay. I am always pissed, I am glad though, bounding through my private disaster. It is how I unbutton the devotional, how I write the note in two. Painting blue eyeliner on my cheek in secret, unlocking new doubt. I am proved by weightlessness like whipped cream on top of guessing.

 

 

Disintegrating Calculus Problem

A dramatic clue lodged in a rockface. Set in a shimmering sound belt slung around the grasses. Collections of numbers signify a large sum, a fatness that cannot be touched. Numbers are heart weight in script. Calculus means a small pebble pushed around maniacally. Binding affection, instead of fear, to largeness.

Ideas are peeled into fours and pinned on the warm corners of earth to flap in a wind. Wind, the product of a swinging axe that splits the sums. This math flowers on the tender back of the knee. An operatic leaf in the tree uses a secret algebra to perforate dense void. The void behaves as a porous slice of rye bread spread thick with salted butter.

Food is braided into the body. On the watchface of the lake, a felled tree trunk keeps protracted time. Circling vaguely like the day does. The circle is dented by the dense tear of a woman without the thing she needs. A loudness about need has a reverse affect. The loud need loses mass. This new thinned need is braided into a story archived in a dark library inaccesible to the public.

The tear weighs the same as a loaf of rye bread. The circle is made of birthday wishes glued together with morning sun mucus. Whatever is hidden is pluckable in time, even sound and meaning. Wind deserves a trophy for revealing this elegantly.

image: Dorothy Chan


SHARE