"What power is: the palm of a grasping hand, & the way I secretly want you
to name me."
More Perihelion:
BobSward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
house fire as bildungsroman
The windows are the first things to break.
Cut to lightning. Cut to the cycles in the body. How Hajime took our picture
After it’s out, you come back w/friends, empty boxes. Your life is every ocean on the moon—
When I woke up on the floor I saw the afterimage—the light smudged around the bulb,
What would you take w/you?
Cut to a blackboard filled w/conjugations. Amo, amas, amat. I wanted to raise my hand & sing.
Did I say pocked & airless? Did I say dry?
The man who can’t talk. The girl who can’t see the painting of the young bride. My nephew,
O dark knowledge! O terrible glories!
Everything you are.
in the Forbidden City, the wall so red & pleasing Mie stopped & cried,
“Here!”
Mare, pocked & airless, dry.
the whole bed in agony.
Then I remembered the flames, my feet small & unprotected as brush. There was nothing
else to do.
the aides deep in his ears. The ones who can’t move, the snapped stems
of their spines.
_______________________________________________________________ figurative poem as psychostasia
Or do we each draw a particular death—the spider web trembling in the window.
How my cartouche will read: small yellow boat; bird; bird.
When I die what part of me will become light as truth, a single ostrich plume?
& the spider web trembling in the window: each spun cell a portal—
Let me believe in it all—infinity, pain, & the things we see in mirrors
Will there be a reconfiguration? Will there be a papering over
At the weighing of the soul, the heart is placed on a balance & everything is gleaned
So much wrong.
Small yellow boat; bird; bird.
& behind the ibis-headed recorder, the Devourer.
Scribe, what did I mean to me? _______________________________________________________________ Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” as Infatuation
What is it about movement?
On the horizon, the growing wheel like something forged.
I want that feeling—the water’s eagerness to respond, to be touched
Because that moment is a living death—borderless, the light
What power is: the palm of a grasping hand, & the way I secretly want you
Or how once far away I woke up under it & wrapped myself in a sheet, the dirt floor
& at the same time my amazement—that I too could be lulled into dying, that this
The way I feel you in my sleep—face textured, cleft.
I saw it written & I saw it say:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Everything has to happen once before it can happen _______________________________________________________________ Motif #1 as Location
This is what the afternoon said: content begets form.
The trick is to capture this in words—the shed’s doors covered
& the late summer sun over the eastern bluffs, the dune grass serrated & whipped,
& the light glittering on the harbor, the shed’s clapboard siding
The first time we met there was nothing to say—the way this fishing shack
What happens when the beginning of a story is no longer told?
Because this is what the afternoon said—the structure red & mythical,
When you think of me this winter, please think of me _______________________________________________________________
something to live through.
in dark rooms at night, the moon hermetic & shifting.
of names?
in profile, our stories painted on reeds.
as if stroked by feathers.
its own season, & because such things can only happen
once.
to name me.
bright & skittering, the night riddled w/satellites, w/things
that can’t escape.
obsession
could be written on my body
in such dark script.
again & again.
w/lures, traps, ropes.
the sound like an insect swarm.
seasonal, rusty.
is its own image, which means I took you for the thing itself—
hands like nets, the small scar at the corner of your eye.
How did I come to feel this way?
intuitive.
as a space.