Heart Vegetation Coming In Thick
I’m studying bug populations in fields
where airplanes have crash-landed, to see
how long they remember the heat——days,
weeks, generations?——if it leads
to any long-term complications
or (maybe) any adaptations we wouldn’t
usually call “accidental”
in quite this sense, a gray wing
to match the ash (hide in it,
obviously, not light it again) or an
uncanny ability to metabolize the new
humus all that death
now reaches downward towards,
as though a confused dreamer’s hand.
Sonaten
1
I grew up surrounded
By trees so I always thought lightning
Was hard to see, finding
The exact bolt, anyway, in a full flash
Of sky above the canopies. Now
Where I live storms
Can be contained over the mountain
’s shoulder, angry clouds
Hotwiring the earth, which is a whole
Different way of understanding
Thunder——broad, but not
Total, something you can cover
With a fist or your favorite song
But who has just one of those anymore
1
I do
It’s called “October” & it’s by
Jackson C. Frank
Here’s a link
I don’t think many people listen
To that particular upload
The algorithm’s buried it
Under other ones
& covers
So when I see the view count go up
I’ll wonder if maybe it’s you
Dear reader
Listening
1
We’re ok
In the global mist of moonbeams
We’re ok
With the little blood of flowers
We’re ok
On the mountain on the mountain
We’re ok
Picking up the turtle
We’re ok
Shepherding him over
We’re ok
With how he peed on us a little
We’re ok
& he is ambling toward the river
1
The longest I have ever been silent
Is nothing
Compared to the longest I will ever be silent
Don’t worry I’ve set my spirit
To auto-loop poems by Georg Trakl
In my inner voice forever
When I die, so it won’t be silent
In the coffin or the urn——
There will be deer
A sister
Reds & greens & blues
& there won’t be
That rotten underline
Below Trakl’s name
1
The longest I have ever been silent
Was a full performance
Of H.I.F. Biber’s Mystery Sonatas
(Aka the Copper-Engraving Sonatas)
By Christina Day Martinson
In Boston
In 2017
My relationship was falling apart
Twin Peaks was about to come out
*Come back
I was about to ghost
A whole organization of Maoists
& I lost all feeling
In my legs
1
“The Minimal” by Theodore Roethke
Has 3.2 stars
On PoemHunter.com
Can’t believe I dignified that
With two links
Two lines
In this poem
Maybe so I can use this
As a kind of
Penitent practice
Beat myself over the head
Until I see
.2 stars
1
purple balloons
1
It’s brutal quiet on the pond
Foggy water
Fallen tree
The catfish making public
Their aversion to corn
Mr. Toad hopping the byways
Baby deer becoming
Adolescent deer becoming
Adult deer becoming
Failed plums on the roadside
I love the mail
Not getting it
Like a joke
About motherhood
1
Dragging the pond like in a cartoon
Stick a stage-hook cane in the mud
& pull
Free Merlin
Disturb Roethke’s
“stone-deaf fishes”
The sign fish
Cutting through the water
Like a bad idea
I ask my mother-in-law
What she thinks of the phrase
“stone-deaf”
Both signs
Near the mouth
1
the warm sutures
1
Lately I haven’t been remembering
My dreams, like at all, so
I’ll invent one:
Setting is your mom’s house
On Washington St.
You just got a giant spider & a snake
& put them in the same glass
Prism
& when I ask you
If that’s advisable or ok you laugh
Spit cherry pits at me
& I pick them all up
I’m losing the breath control
I’m losing
1
A hind interrupts the parade
Of male animals
& incomplete stars
The easiest place to find
Information about deer
Terminology is on
Hunting websites
My body is one
Of the purple balloons
From Jack Spicer
’s Book of Magazine Verse
“all cast off together into a raining sky”
Readily punctured
Dew-wet
1
mitered corners
1
We’re ok
Hiding fathers in the rainbow
We’re ok
Gathering costmary
We’re ok
With the whale-shaped laundry basket
We’re ok
Putting almost nothing in it
We’re ok
Telling stories to the swingset
We’re ok
Wrist broken by the slide
We’re ok
& the cast comes off on Sunday
1
“Ordinarily
A dance
In
Triple
Meter,
Webern's
Passacaglia
Is
Neither
A dance
Nor
In
Triple
Meter
How to Construct a Circle Given Three Points
The cat is trying to sleep
off his neck wound from the fox
It’s deep
caterpillared with blood
But he is alive
& snoring
Sawing wood
in the barn
He lacks
a concept of luck
But even if he had one
the pain when he wakes up
He’ll groom himself
& not need it
Tom Snarsky is a math teacher who writes poems. His book Light-Up Swan is available from Ornithopter Press.
Mesmerizing work, invention and soulfulness balanced, both ends of the seesaw up and level. Thank you.
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