Two by
Mark DuCharme
After Guest
The nude depends on our perspective—
A seeker of form who clutters space.
July isn’t leaving
Until we trace
The heat of the seen by the longing
For grace, a portal of vital wildflowers
Tied to the speech of the nude. The nude bloats;
It bunches up & tries again.
The door to the air of the water heals
& A cloud alters the perspective of shimmers,
Ragged when we go.
The nude depends on her own agency—
Flowers by the water
Bent in cut light.
When we go & contest what it says we mean we do
In the light we are vanishing still but do not know
We are always & only saying & vanishing
When she knows what she knows & we go there, too—
Disjunctive pillows, tethered heaps
That slip out in the wind, then leave.
What is it
That you want to know? What makes you despair
When we are always & only as we are—
Savage birds in a savage terrain?—
A state, or statute, of grace
Held out to sea, as if hoping to vanish.
Apprehension
“Apprehension is so close it produces and can’t see.”
—Leslie Scalapino
Time goes out & moves around us
Sky isn’t equal to bone or crystal
Igneous foliated dusk while being
Sentient parts of lucid trees
The wind is sometimes cruel
We smile awkwardly
Who am I when I look into a mirror?
Is ‘being’ being ‘natural?’
I can guess the circumference & weight of a frog
Of a star, of tentative guests
Who never sing or whisper
But foretell an ancient doom
I laugh at moths
In comfortable houses
Full of cheese
I rot in foyers full of interlocking questions
The ropey willows’ shadows are not all I seek
Blur the factory & its agate entry points
Infused by pipes of petrochemical whispers
Bound in fruits of sand & copper
Blurted into the very pores where you seek peace
Here, all superimpositions are the same
Are we ever purely connected beings
Who seek a cure to unknown doom?
The freight trains run, to dull excitement
(There is no ‘freight’)
There is no freight or arching bird, roused by the sight of gloom
(‘Freight’ is an attitude that must be ordained)
I don’t know where I go to speak
The future is inside us
In forgotten drifts, promotional banter
Toward which naked winds may one day intervene
Mark DuCharme is the author of We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film, Counter Fluencies 1-20, The Unfinished: Books I-VI, Answer, The Sensory Cabinet and other works. 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, 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.