This Poem Contains No Natural Fibers, and: August, in the Backyard, with the Sunset’s Reflection in Clouds and “Candy Girl”
- This Poem Contains No Natural Fibers, and: August, in the Backyard, with the Sunset’s Reflection in Clouds and “Candy Girl”
This Poem Contains No Natural Fibers
This poem is completely understandable, shining toward you off the stainless rollers. Utterly seamless, this poem’s homogenous glow. If from its first spill a hairy tube groped for soil, if a sticky green eye like an infection trembled at the top— it’s been buffed to the unified hardness below. When an early draft breathed hot fur in a burrow, when its paws smelled strongly of paw, a slurry soaked the matter to molecular components. Every word fresh from the extruder. We were keeping the room empty. This poem with its bowl of light on the sill. This poem in its solid quiet, in the slight scent of flame retardant. This poem, pure block, replication removed, comes with erasure, so it can turn once, this poem unopened, in mint condition. [End Page 157]
August, in the Backyard, with the Sunset’s Reflection in Clouds and “Candy Girl”
There are no words to “Sail Away Lady.”Maybe the ocean we sail away on is love, and all we do with language, and musicis play in the wind, this time of year especially. —Coleman Barks, “First Cool, Windy Evening, with ‘Sail Away Lady’ ”
The lily in closeup like fine hairs in an ear, and up there a rosin-white cloud, a gold red cloud, and the tune with a swee on the high strings, an answering chirrup, chir-chip on the low.
These rosebrittle shirttail clouds, the pinkest white high strings’ Western light.
In Candy Girl’s brittle shellac, the fir cones come crackling down by the fence, down in the surface noise of dried needles, down in the shriveled dropped blackberries.
High in the treetop the quick birdbreast light, the tune pouring out through the screens to an ear like a miniature sunset, its bloodwhorls and hiss-pop horizons, and to the unstuffing pinkish-brown chair, its billows mice live in all year.
Candy Girl’s where to start if you want to learn bowing, pulse, dip, shake, saw, the high Western light the white hair of the bow. In the southeast, last pinketty pink.
Earlier this unearthly day: thunder, no rain. If you’d never seen a fiddle played or heard recorded music, you’d think the tune the air: the light far and high, the white underside of the bowbird shivering off at the three-minute mark. [End Page 158]
molly tenenbaum’s books include Mytheria, published by Two Sylvias Press in 2017; The Cupboard Artist; Now; By a Thread; and the artist book/chapbook collaboration with artist Ellen Zeigler, Exercises to Free the Tongue. Molly’s banjo recordings are Instead of a Pony and Goose & Gander. She teaches at North Seattle College and Dusty Strings Music School.
