from Bourn
David Wolf
Notice how
the opening flatters
the veil, energizes,
prompts you to listen closely,
to instill in the silence
a sense of memory’s turns and widening ebb.
Sentient drift—
sands to answer to and no deal down.
The depths may
own your laughter at a loss,
as it goes, remember.
A few more words for now.
Yesterday, to no avail,
the crew-stroke of happiness
trolling its refrain
as the obvious ret(r)ains
its tantrums.
Retinue everlasting
beneath the flex of invisible laughter
easing not these xeric times, these orbits
that levy the observable turning away—
grainy sidestep of yore . . .
alkanet root—its likening dye,
a sunset answering
the invisible net,
no etude, no terminus,
tensile as the florid restart that is autumn’s true making,
a remnant uttered,
a sleepless angle of static,
an exit to the tenor of belief’s looping urges,
filmic form—
all this as the moon rises
over the wide river, emerging
from light’s blue to hang awhile,
just like the old days, you laugh,
then doze in the sheen.
David Wolf is the author of six collections of poetry, Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier I, Sablier II, Visions (with artist David Richmond), and Weir (a micro-chapbook from Origami Poems Project). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals, including BlazeVOX, Cleaver Magazine, dadakuku, decomp, E·ratio, Indefinite Space, Lotus-eater, New York Quarterly, Otoliths, and River Styx Magazine. He is a professor emeritus of English at Simpson College and serves as the poetry editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.