The Fish Market
The idea being that people, generally and at short distance
Would start moving away
Repelled by an interior motive impossible to explain
Like flies in the water
The lichen covering the face of rock
Growing away from the plausibility of skin
But nice enough
Each moment is so difficult
In each place at all times
The whole configuration of reality is deciding itself
Building a sky made up a lot like this one
Where I can see cloud after heavy cloud
So much for a brief sort of impression
Wherever you are abstractly I hope you can see the sky
It’s quite warm now
Almost time for dinner
**
Lichenologies
for Damian Liu
All over the ground-flaked
green’s initial impulse, the light
creeps under what
is now
suspicious
golden—
impossible proof,
or,
what the snow hides.
Then I
look
for first rocks. Sliding
down the hill,
now first in
the valley sludge—
impossible
green.
Two rats
show their teeth
beneath the roots, into
the melting
afternoon,
turn left,
uncertain moves,
like that.
If the creases
prepare, exasperating,
we’re present. This is
beyond it. In the
red-line cave, words
creep toward
their mossy figures,
suspicious gold.
And here the moon
forms into signs
of movement.
Here the smell
of fresh rot makes
soundings into movement, words form
to rough intention, shadowed cold
in the mediate surroundings.
What
we say
and where we say it. Dripping
on the map, snowy.
We creep down icy
through the tunnels,
swim quick
into the marrow.
Snowy and depth-charged in the evening.
Everything like that.
Speaking
in smaller pieces.
Wetter,
drier.
**
Dream Critique
He kept an image of a leaf in mind and eventually we
Moved in and weaned off an older standard and looked
Into those palm-sized mirrors and spied a handcarved case
With a tawdry wind as I heard you call it.
Waited and waited for what I wished for and whispered
Had it not yet dried.
And in a divine capacity he steals your books and tapes
With forethought all throughout and then with a drink,
Wanting all night to hear poems dripping from leaves beside the sea
And you gluing them together.
But something she said that night about materiality and it seemed wrong
It’s our turn to say it now and it seems wrong,
And even ten years post facto in the haze, she was
Improbably brilliant on the sea.
Look now at all that vanity, that lust for fame, look how they vaunt
Their cold cachet
Taking their thoughts remanded but to vomit
The sunken eyes and tints,
And a white stone on a white stone and the planes
On which their fantasies play out.
And now three glasses deep in dreams they say it
But it’s wrong they have no hearts & have no lungs,
Their bottles only bottles and their friends
All wrong, and how can they stand the distance.
Tonight rain drenching a world in which the world
And water that drips from sky onto the leaves,
Sold out of mixed-grain sourdough in a second and that way every
Day another and another.
Picture what all appears to the machine,
Springtime Chicago,
Hour after hour the implosive music…
**
CARL DENTON is a writer currently based in Chicago. His writing has appeared in The Cleveland Review of Books, MTV News, and 8 Poems.
