In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

Some Values of Landscape and Weather

S O M E VA L U E S O F L A N D S C A P E A N D W E AT H E R Democrat—I know what time it is . . . —hart crane In the middle of our lives we walked single file into winter’s steely pavilion. The moss’s greening, winningly, made our footfalls pavane in silver light. To be out on a Tuesday with Liberty, her bright flash stinging. I followed willingly, she sang haltingly, and I kept closer to navigate her coo and whisper. To be at the farther edge of beauty, this forest, its lacquered raiment, we declined to name. The song built with the populism of a mural. Bits of refrain dovetailing into a distant rumble like a bulldozer from memory, a mockingbird’s gravelly clank. 85 ★ Where were we on the deck having a smoke after a day in bed. Odd oranges and blue velvet outline the roofs. We’ve stalled in this whistle before, the train at dusk. Thinking oompahs of dented brass yesteryear calling on the road: cloth, hair, and a string to guide us. Take me away. Not to negate these years but I need stay rutted in my own long enough to swerve outside this collision of particles that dogs my view. I am working on hands to field other hoists of rescue—something particular to blue has begun to rise from the deep and do its shtick. And falling down dark, of course I need you, but that said all the ropes thrown overboard wouldn’t find me, like sun once dripping into basement punkdom. ★ 86 Not wanting to disturb an ant I lift my leg to let it carry on its pursuit of whatnot. It’s impressive—all this matter crawling, marching, even achieving an acorn of the instant. So, this isn’t exactly novelty here babysitting the woodgrain, wanting to step up inside myself. Courage!, carrots?, “Charity,” the word says in a notebook —to accept the ink of the possible, “this proves I have dreamed.” ★ It is the pixel hour, a witching pre-code silver industry blowing through my head. Ball bearings glide along making it ting, a steely chamber overhead. Unmistakable. I might have said forgotten except so many are bent to hear it, as though music were a condition of all our endeavor here on the snow-spattered globe. 87 A nervous moon and winter branches all that needs be recorded for now and the value of gunmetal fading to midnight all around. The chill is real, that much can be said in early November. ★ We fought in a war, looking for a sound, some frequency a human animal could field beyond the other registers of everyday and fancy, a tuning perhaps, to focus for this instant, the effort toward dotted archipelagoes was a part of it, documentary hydroelectric facilities, sno-cone mountain views, certainly the unruly assembly of public space is essentialism, there can be pigeons, statehouses and prisons, freeways et cetera. They were big chords, a piece of the total score, the trajectory (not facts, but hands) is this further sound, scratch of pen to parchment in a flight of democracy. 88 ★ Night coming on, goings to and fro under a canopy of burning discs and that twinkling bigness. It was all the time happening. Here beneath the shadow of branch and ballot. Where else can you say that to love the questions you have to love the answers. Outside, a transmission’s whine breaks our unmediated approach to a brambled paradise. What could we do now our gaze had been altered, and constantly. The shiny spot’s decoy, sometimes emotive, sometimes in bright digression. 89 ...