Three by

 

Mark DuCharme

 

 

 

 

One Who Hides

 

 

Hurry, while I still don’t grieve

Some of the silence is made out of words

If I follow, which I doubt

Before the insurance money kicks in

I’ll have to get it stamped

& Wear the right suit

With some of the blowback still underneath

 

She was having none of it

It was time for cold sandwiches & lemons

The man held up a National guitar & grinned menacingly

“Some of this silence is made out of words,”

He crooned, though it hardly explained

What everyone was doing there at the bodega

At five AM sharp, looking as if they’d found another clue

 

To the Circadian Codex, swathed in myrtle

As all true harbingers are, when daylight slips

Away between their toes, & night

Commences its ominous silence made out of words

Words that one had long ago forgotten rhyme

With ‘smoke,’ ‘infinity’ & ‘one who hides

With his face pressed to the door’

 

 

 

 

Hunter’s Moon

 

 

I don’t know that I’m

So much outside

The scene, as the scene’s

Outside of me

 

I don’t know very much more

Than I’m willing to say I mean

I’m sorry then to meet out loud

With a true industry leader

 

While all the other indices remain

Pure fan fiction

I sing the festival circuit

Far from defective machines

 

Throughout green seasons’ vital usages

These are those who are with us still

After day friends soon impart

Raw notice of intermittent birds

 

Whose characters stretch all credulity

In moody October, under

The yellowing trees

A stain or series of stains binds us

 

Whose souls are burnished flight

A lavender knapsack, or

Is it too early

To view lost films’ ancient trains

 

Your depredation is now complete

Your bill is ninety-four dollars

Close tab, then stumble

Is it possible to like a poem

 

If you don’t like the ending?

 

 

 

 

Doubts

 

 

Can the soul whistle? I think I hear it now

Under a too-bright sky. Can you translate

Doubts? Have books ever haunted

You? Truth moves

 

By radiant means, to get past us,

Through you, through life itself & beyond,

To think past what’s gone wrong, what still

Goes on with us. In what tight corners

 

Will you soon wander through? We’re still sometimes

Present to each other

Knowingly, in absent times. & Then I think

Too needfully

 

About what is yet unmade— made flesh, in fact

By emptiness. & Then I want to

Find you there,

Collapsed among the masses, or mattresses— embodied

 

In a moment jangled, multipli-

cities of tune, so mediated, so unrehearsed,

So hidden from natural view. It’s true,

I was an outsider under the table—

 

& These are moments I decline to

Be in, when we are all untrue, but drifting

Into play. Dwell there in that

Periphery, that great hope, rising

 

Which seeks the world from without

As the shambling townspeople all gather, knowingly

At the horizon, like cracked chalices, crying,

“So here you are again. By what bright jouissance

 

Is the land

Embedded in your gaze?” Nothing

Else is absolute but this, & if you wait for it

Long enough, the wind won’t be standing in

 

For you anymore. Jump off it then

& Let it flow

For a day or two, at least

In ways the lovelorn kindle us with scorn.

 

I take it the song is still going on

Though you are here & whistling

Like a thief in blonde architecture.

Something there is is being settled now

 

In this furnace that night means,

In this mix of sirens & balcony chatter.

When the rest of the world merely wishes to be

We also want to be set free.

 

What lingers does not move us now,

Copped by hidden thrills

Alongside nights held open, torn—

Aching to be believed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark DuCharme is the author of We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, The Unfinished: Books I-VI, Answer, The Sensory Cabinet and other works.  His book-length work Here, Which Is Also a Place will be published this summer by Unlikely Books.  In addition, two chapbooks are forthcoming: Scorpion Letters from Ethel, and Thousands Blink Outside from Trainwreck Press.  His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado. 

 

 


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