1. |
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All the phone calls clotted a hum in my inner ear.
And every walk became a thick pencil underlining the same
three newspaper sentences until the paper shredded.
Every vine-ripened song throbbed
into airspace toward fighters looking for you
deckside on your friendly aircraft carrier.
How enticing, the glance you flung
like neighbor tossing a pail of water onto a house fire.
Signal the birds in then jump.
Twirl your orange sticks like sparklers or hurl them.
How enticing, your good harmonizing,
your tambourine jangling in the back of your rickety pickup––
(turn off your signal and sing,
something like the note you left on the table.
take the alley home and park cockeyed on the yard
and know this: I am inside pitting your real cherries.
I am forwarding each piece of your mail.)
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2. |
Antidote
04:12
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A creek cures quiet,
slurs out the unsounding day of pursed lips,
leads by example, barrels without straining,
stresses what sickens into it, slats the platted bluff,
wrests birches into itself,
rockfall clatter subliminal beneath,
birds calling out their spring needs.
Creek makes a good fence,
better than stone piles, centuries,
a field, bones of fish,
woodpiles, lichen one day
wrapping a cairn into place,
Silence at a creek is daylong,
days long, swollen and uncrossable.
A creek can make a good fence,
neighbor to nothing, grumbling
in darkness through which its erosion
and clatter is just audible,
trees toppling over the steep bluff, into water.
A creek thickened into one channel
tries to braid itself,
is a torrent that seeks to shallow and calm itself
beside me here, living unfenced, the leaves
patching away the sky and weather,
the nature of this tin roof
(amplifying rainfall
as leaves, grown just since middle May,
amplify winds and muddle the water's murmur.)
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3. |
Here We Are
05:21
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I listen to every voice I left to be here
repeating the last little words I heard.
I am a pathway out of them.
Why won't they write.
When was the last talk.
I am back in my body, nearly,
I am on my way here by a new magnetism
reminiscent of early, pre-industrial
gravity and cloud shadow,
pastoral landscapes uncanonized by oil.
We paint ourselves with silt mud
without decorum or devotion.
This fallout is a residue of sweat
and our curtains were torn down
and soaked in paint thinner.
We flip the calendar,
enamored with rain on the cabin window.
We may or may not be in this together.
We may or may not remember this tomorrow,
though the story will pass on and on and on.
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4. |
Runoff
04:50
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It's morning in the lower west
where you retreated and seasoned in.
And summer heat is a snow slope
where you dug out a hibernation cave,
you landscaped the arid valley
with the rivers passing through,
you drove treelineward with the sunroof
open to the first rain
as birds pummeled the voices of DJs––
drops leap but not free of the stream,
and I shed layers.
The sun grazes close and
ice is linoleum in the valley.
Water magnetized water
and the town held you in your orbit
became a ceremony of trying not to go, waterborne,
on out, anonymous, common.
Leave the power lines and wires,
leave behind ditches aspiring onward.
Aspire, break free.
I was the only one going anywhere.
Gravel pelted the underbelly of the vehicle. I squinted into the brightness and
went out from there where you are.
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5. |
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Jets descend past me
into a pastel town sky
and disappear as stones
sink into water. Mallards and teal settle
on the slush slough of a half-frozen river.
I remember your strangest idea,
the tune slip of your voice under nerves,
common hair growing from your body,
the yellow of grasses under melted snow.
I can guess your altitude,
the airplane window framing your dreams.
You're no given and I have belittled
the habit of correspondence with distant
friends who travel to relish
home water out of a tap.
There's a man in the village
watching the strip your plane will know
and he is the poisoner
of dogs, wolves.
Gaze fraught with gales,
he gillnets the swum awe
of our homing instincts,
dragnetting sea vents, the soft
tissues of your body
which are, I imagine,
the brightest aquatic creatures
inside the opaque gut
of the ocean.
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6. |
We Were Explorers Once
05:23
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Ice breaks up each spring––
the ocean and rivers grow teeth
and lose them, place them
under pillows of fog
lose them to drifts of warmth
in the coldest, killingest depths
where small edible whales
move like clots through a bloodstream,
where their shadows in shallow seas
are vaguely alive and vaguely something else,
the shape of old ships, the footprints of old explorers
tromping crabwise through some imagination.
To what end did we venture
out of the old world
to the endcaps of the earth,
shelterless, wearing comely myths
we couldn't believe would become truths
up at the globe's neckline?
If our wants are trivial
our best wars are tussels,
our worst weather is rime on road signs,
breath of the water in the morning.
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7. |
Wood Heat
05:00
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I come from those who trim unseemly branches,
who edit for horizons, lake views.
I climbed trees and cut them down,
got caught in their fine crooks dizzyingly high
then worked my way back to earth
and felled them for the fireplace.
The waver of opaque smoke coughed upward.
My grip has been sticky with pitch
like my calluses, my clothes.
From my grandfather's basement,
cement wood room
with a trapdoor to the outdoors,
a hydraulic log splitter, my own axe,
a pocket knife, the dog eyeing birds.
I'm my own axe, a woodpile.
Fires bundled, left on the stoop.
If one loves trees one almost loves
the self, also almost others?
We nailed birdhouses to trees
and watched birds through the windows of our house.
We kept wooden matches at hand.
Fire was our crackling
iteration of a plan to go on
and on we meant to go.
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Michael Dickerson Anchorage, Alaska
I see art as a means of connecting with people, understanding them, and being understood by them. It is an interaction in response to each other and the place we live.
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