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ISSUE
NUMBER NINE - SPRING 2008 |
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Selected Poems ROOM WITH BLUE LIGHT SECURED AGAINST HARES GALAXY PANTOUM WHEN THE WIND WAS REALLY A GOOSE * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * |
BIVOUAC Midnight, I sit with my dog by the parking lot on a weathered bench, and stare at Mars. Sanguine dot among the sandblast glitter and blackness; minute, like the first drop of menstruation. My dog smells the gasolined rags, possum, the ooze of snails glistening in moonshine; he yawns, shivering for an instant, the way a man does when peeing after a long commute. A car backfires, and then the leaves and apartment building creaking in the wind. My dog doesn't understand, but this parking lot is my loneliness; empty cars, and litter scampering. And so I think, this is why I look up at Mars: an absence, like my words in the comprehension of this dog or other men who rise confident in sunlight. Barrenness, soil of iron-oxide, dunes swirling in the gaps between near and far, poetry and silence, man and woman. Because what were once open fingers, clenched into a fist, yet will open again to scoop water or touch a breast. These thoughts wax and wane, polar-caps expanding with permafrost of dry-ice; I remember her, and my words, like dust whistling in no ears, ancient water, buried, and that will never burst until the sun swallows the earth. Another dog barks from a yard, and the dog at my side stretches, howls, is answered, and sets off into the street. The difference between this parking lot and my dunes is the air pressure and proximity of hope; the difference between man and beasts is like that between new water on Mars, and water in a rusting basin in a desert where rattlesnakes nest. Anthony Seidman |
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