 |
COLE SWENSEN
EMPTY BODY
If I sat on an edge the gate clicked shut and the world thus recalled
If a man had walked into a church, if a man closed his hand, you’d
call it a fist, but that was not. The gate
immense, this one foot after foot, a break in the sun because the foot fell there and the grass had a train as some might have
a line of smoke for horizon which makes the thread slip with a sound sewn, a foot laced
a line now at the edge made of them
WHO WAS
who was an ordinary man who turned to light a stove who shadow-flew-on-wall
will nothing there awake like anybody else
who, picking up the mail and so the shattered half I watched a man
walking down a hill
who then came to him watched I a man and therein within
who slices bread
who did
and did not bleed and straightened up
with the shears in one hand and the zinnias in the other,
the corner of the eye is an enormous room.
AISLES
One time in a burning house
Once in the thought, as they turned in the hall
They were a home we found ourselves
Again a nail falling in a wall Remember one
Who called to you from the top of the stair, there
We lived, is what
Anyone would have said
Why do we find ourselves back in a house, you ask
Don’t the dead
Live in the sky, just at the edge,
the house was a candle at the end of a hall, was a
match that blew out because you looked at it the house was a candle
at the end of a hall, a match, don’t you find that a candle, even unlit
sheds a warmth that comes from the fact that it’s white.
GESTA
But when they saw the wound but when was full of hounds a pack
can hound, can trace a grain of salt back to its arc that could not be staunched
was an arrow thrown by hand and though they’d never seen him before
they knew his name and so the town was saved
In the Middle Ages, the ghost story was not a genre as such, but was something that accrued
not without alarm yet with a kind of trust
she took the wound without the arm and wore it as a past.
|
