#1 Imperfect dreams.#1 Imperfect dreams, each sleeper hung upon the meathook of a question mark, clock stuck in succession an hour when loneliness looks just another way of loving alone yourself. What's the plural of dark? Nighthawks reciting a thousand names for night, a month you'd have to sort by the agency of thousands of streetlights to find. #2 An impression of her material part left tangled in sheets patterned with moonlit craters by way of the lace curtain that had printed her back with sprays of wildflowers native, perhaps, to a field in southern Bohemia. And, beyond the field, by means of an open window, a moonlit river that, despite its pessimism, mirrors swans. Or for a like reason the- bed, abandoned, was dreaming upon its own. I wouldn't nap there, I wouldn't kneel and pray beside it. #3 for John forest-lands 1926-1995 Pizzicato of nightwings against protections Listen to the roar of weedlots, or the wilds behind illuminated billboards where shadows of nighthawks soar across enormous faces. You'll hear a craving appetite that can't be satisfied in an all-night diner. Nightflyers don't want night to stall. Their wingbeats fan darkness as if it were a flame able to flare up darker still. By disappearing new tail-lights of fireflies, moths in which the satellite is visible, unfold from cocoon of oblivion, while time metamorphoses into a impregnate [i]or[/i] imbue with grateful odor of black marigolds. Poem at STUART DYBEK are forthcoming in Iowa Review, modern England Review, and TriQuarterly. He teaches at Western Michigan University. Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Nov/Dec 2001 |
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