from Kos

 

Steven Salmoni

 

 

 

 

         , in the auditor’s repair

 

                                  the sun, and prior body, hypothesized

 

so the fan-palm augured, the leaf still

    unfolded

 

for its agency to recover more than moved to belay

    a music gone cold

 

[with respect

                   to a system for the dead

 

originally: (The music to turn cold with respect to a system of respect,

                   another music for the dead)]

 

decisively apart, the letter read,

 

         more than moved where lay the movement

 

 

 

 

 

So with regard to derivation, why does he laugh? And what are

the meanings of the supplicant? I hold that reality, if present

 

 

                             the most common patterns are irregular

                             in themselves, events are

 

 

A man falls;

the street who

 

         is passing laughs

 

                                                       “the letter wrote (for it was written)

 

                   the moon underlined

                   the volcanoes of Lancerota

                   Forteventura covered with ashes

 

         and now the years

 

my darling

are

 

 

 

 

 

Sage exclusions from the wall

         in root water some time not immortal, germ, and it is numerous

 

The water lies, but unifies

 

 

    the palm of your hand we know as loss, the call not found

 

    the millet oath, while deleted,

                        is still a sense. Is bitter, the palm, your hand

 

 

a certain decline and

                                                 is a cloud not a horse

 

“the clouds, farther and

                   to speak, deciduous

 

 

 

 

 

I will hide you say, the transition is complete, the line of instruments

     a-row upon each side, the ground, the infinitive

 

         mixed with our long echo

 

 

the instrument, collateral, the clay

 

                   seemed to be a star, and

 

                   the case is implicit, you said

 

 

                             to name the state to echo sequence

 

                             to plot, this function,

 

                        organs’

                                  reason

 

                                            not to hide the field

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steven Salmoni’s recent publications include A Day of Glass, the chapbook Landscape, With Green Mangoes (both from Chax Press) and poems in Otoliths, Puerto del Sol, P-Queue, The Brooklyn Review and Interim.  Selections from his work have also appeared in the anthologies The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Editions, 2022) and The Last Milkweed (Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2023).  He teaches at Pima Community College in Tucson, AZ and also serves on the Board of Directors for Chax Press and for POG, a Tucson-based literary and arts organization that hosts an annual reading series. 

 

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