Two Poems

 

by Carey Scott Wilkerson

 

 

 

 

Notes on a City Scrim

Columbus, GA, August (or was it?), 2010

 

 

I will have been living outside

the seven systems of a body,

old and forgiving, held under the arc

of the bridge over thirteenth street,

and a machinist’s burial tomb or

a foundry across indeterminate

lines of sight

 

I will have seen light sewn

across the train yard

and into certain secret turns

suspended now in the summer haze

fissures now in winter fog

else and trouble to the drifting horns

grit in the mechanisms of desire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rock-Quarry Wall Graffiti for Felix

 

 

There has been talk of an emerging periodicity,

precisely the kind of speculative prattle that

compels us to imagine stylized departures,

wave cycles of constitutive games.

 

Of course, this thesis turns entirely

on the twin axes of lost referents

and certain grim proprieties of faith.

We have wondered to what degree this

represents your characteristic motion,

the (igne)ous differential in tracing against

your own quilted scrims of memory.

 

And then there was the fear that

we could not bear the necessary incompleteness

or survive its noumenal marbling of desire.

What, then, to make of this fugitive talking,

codes of displacement negotiated at the frontier’s

edge, the disappearing evidence?

 

Yours is that machine of an else in madness,

recombinant touch and go, nomenclatures in parallax,

unconfirmed rumors of a message received

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carey Scott Wilkerson is a member of the English department at Columbus State University where he teaches composition, literature, and creative writing.  He is a recipient of a 2009 residency fellowship from the Lillian E. Smith Center for Creative Arts.  He is co-founder of Dead Academics Press, an independent publisher of avant-garde poetry and fiction.  He has a full-length volume of poems, Threading Stone (New Plains Press, 2009), from which the poem “Rock-Quarry Wall Graffiti for Felix” has been taken, and an e·chap, Polylogue (E·ratio Editions, 2010).