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.