STUDY FOR SWIMMING HOLE
after Etel Adnan
//
Last time
A prop of air
peals
Against all that has taken place
Salt meadows extra accidentally beautiful
Glass
my hands are full of
Hiving the inner lining
an eye shuts
Done and seen actions
amount to the same
“little more than
a register”
On the draw
Study for swimming hole
Study for hand (reverse)
Discrepant parts of control
They are streaked with this specious transparency
That the furniture I famished will not eat me now
To make the farness varnish
You lay it to rest as you relate it
“Even a meadow
with crow flight and grass fires”
“How remote
the infinite air was
that filled our chests”
Because it costs too much to be human
Everything was certain
as second order representation
in the order of the seconds
//
The exorbitant render
The consensus in the
word cotton
Calls to light
Squat tags
Return to this approximation
that soon exudes
“How to intervene in time”
at least three times
with different emphases
In the body or the sky
A poppy of pink brick
Which is “either stroke or color”
as glass
Forms
a hive that smells
of goat and jasmine
//
You don’t have to paint passage anymore
but being
hermetic to what we call paper
the grass or fat of it
that’s resinous and doesn’t want to scar
Written apart
as such
As from the far off “latest” from the one right here
You are quite captive
You are quite alive
“And hanging over all of this
was the apprehension”
//
To hesitate or grasp
the air
is no longer made of that ment
the dead linger
Seeming whole
as a round
To be reconciled by excelling
Aloft out
The chant tree
Ex
hales
Naked gauges
Inchoate
and so susceptible
They double from a paucity of face
The infinite obligation which the presence to one of the other is
//
As for mirrors
Ways rhyme with ice
All we can do is shake them
Each one makes the same sound
And this is generally regarded as safe
The valley the vocabulary
the great camouflage
To resist the garden
where all trees
are precisely given
an appointment
What has and what has sought as substitute
“A lyrical climate”
Tion as hail
Flower of cell
Or in a moment
Fly le
“There loss”
there “the re sky”
From which you hoped would ebb your perfect complement
The impossibly spoken outgrowth in the balance it fires back
The range of trio in the leeward truce found in others
//
“Nature is oblivious”
“Give me your lipstick”
Give me your streets and suddenly in concert
the “last
on everyone’s lips”
authoring nothing
Our R
Fragments which wipe out the dignity
of the conflict they resolve
The “ous oaks”
in the audience
Won’t take it easy
Like variegated Easter
Lace
palpitates
a fading light
That doable “which”
To graft the desire
it remains
For the voices to look
Where they come from
//
Bent
“philtre”
Bird
leather
Lineation
Final
night in the pool
**
MAXWELL GONTAREK has poems out or forthcoming in Coma, αntiphony, Lana Turner, Volt, Noir Sauna, Works & Days, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.
