PoetryEtc Featured Poet: Mark Weiss
Affirmation.
Made solid
contract
a signature.
Signed off on off/
on.
Reaffirmed
all over again.
*
John Hancock. Hand
cock? half
cocked?
Crockery?
Language
as real as grass
or glass.
*
Career.
A wild ride.
So it turns out we find ourselves half way through
the one career.
*
Oration.
A golden prayer or ate
or shun or ate
the sun
the tongue
become golden.
He ate
the sun, was vey
porized.
*
Lapidary.
Lapidoggy
little dogie dairy la pide
asks
for it, milk of memory
the life of mammals.
*
Fault
falls down the downy
hillside
blême blameless.
What could be softer than this crack in the rock?
By the dawn's early light lit
by the sun in its going down.
*
Flow floe flower flux flumen flume fume font funnel refurbish furbelow
and above glissando glider patination pasturize pastoso
en el campo
hay plaquetas tenemos
plástica, pichones vuelan de la hierba cuando anda la gente en
botas románticas
las faldas pesantes y mojadas de las damas cuelgan insectos y serpientes
y los nidos
abandonados construidos de flores.
No tiene el campo nada después, después
el río repleto de cosas ablandadas por el agua y la gravedad. Qué
edad tienen las niñas que
flotan en el diluvio?
Sauce a sort of fate, we say cooked
in its own juice, in the milk
of human kind-
ness.
*
He talks and talks in the hope that something will happen
to create an ending.
*
aghast ghastly ghostly August a gust
the ghost of Augustulus, a pygmy
among Romans.
Not even important enough for slaughter. But possibly
more fun to drink with than his predecessors.
*
Valve veyihiyeh a valuent an effluent oh happie
happie
pair perhaps a pear or
pared
a hand in the rubble making sense
of it. What we know become center what we come to know
disposed around it. A hand
protrudes from a hill of stone as if the body strove to rise above as
if drowning as if the project were to
turn stone to liquid.
Or saying : “this hill is mine,” or, “hale”, or,
hieratic gesture or merely
at the point of death summoning the dog to play.
*
The deadman's hand
proclaims the land.
*
Burnt-umber undercoat
and a scumbled surface
reds and greens
as if incandescing, as if
glow-in-the-dark
psycho
delic dis, or
dys
placed is this
ok is this per
mitted, what kind
of mitt per
what?
Watt? Coll
lated, with milk may be beside
the sea, sidled up to the beau-
tiful sea or
tolled to lead
o! ended
by water.
*
Because accustomed to a set of pronouns
like dress or a cut of hair
a way to walk or run
a piece of body
a set of glands
as if to say
pronouns
is fate. A possible evil inherent
in becoming accustomed to one or another.
*
I knew a woman who slept with the entire history department, Professor Joe
on Mondays, etc., “but Sundays
I keep for myself.” She would caress my hand
when she passed the salt.
What are the outlets for that kind of talent?
She told me I would have to wait
for a vacancy, but I was next in line.
*
Thirteen ways of looking at a blackboard.
The privilege of washing a stone.
Understanding that within the rubble there's a unity of intention, a palimpsest.
In the depths was a motive or at least a motif.
Staggering through leafy darkness—hark!
What harkens? The cliff in silhouette
as if seen sideways, was somehow
smaller,
feminine,
moon,
dog,
detritus,
demented,
delimited.
At the edge of the cliff
At the deep cleft
At the impulse to scramble downwards
upwards
downwards
ins Grüne
ins Grüne
wet spring
the ooze of what process set in motion when I step there
my hand rested against granite
dripping with watercress, every thing
changed, or
imperceptibly.
*
One wants the species fellowship.
*
Breasting the wave we say put your weight
on one leg, then
the other, your weight
where it matters. We say
there will be a guiding hand
a respite, but don't
count on it.
*
Having spent a decade fixated on the backs of knees
and another on the folds of flesh when she turns her neck
and another on tendrils of hair and the struggle
between civilization and chaos in the way she wears it.
The thing about the ephemeral is that it's ephemeral. That's
what gets you. The thing about the ephemeral
is that it's ephemeral.
