Excerpts from some deer left the yard moving day

 

by Andrew K. Peterson

 

 

 

 

Dear other person,

 

 

for the whole story call star-star shield

 

betw. leaf-foam a hard body edge

   night(in)sects sing

    e  in clumps        e

 

pulse in gut in step to / continuously

 

feet lift off ground / only so far

about grief, the frame

doesn’t fit the screen

 

 

 

insufficient answers

such is moment of doubt in the beginnings

 

 

luminal lava . immemorial swirls

Water   /   Smoke   /   Fire

ash in arrangement

as long origin

as the long goodbye

 

form-summoning in neo-incandescent caverns

 

waterfalls, volcanoes,

cloud riptide bubbles thrown across

vast screens’ miniscule reflectors  ( hip’s asleep

 

         “The image was too weak to show

up on the bodies of animals or

actors in goatmen costumes”

 

veiny leafy drip dreaming of dinosaur blood trees

daguerro-trope from pin prick wall in card

board box camera shadows narrative,   thinly

bearable because the next shot has Brad Pitt in it.

 

and allowing points to center in white sky

Uncross this line.

 

 

Alright then what made it do that –

is the cloud-water baby an

 

( grief, thief, child underwater

 

orbit / not really waking but insinuating

 

volcano sockets

after seaweed coils in a jar

 

 

 

 

Patriarchy, privilege

 

hushes “get” dark

acting out backwards

towards whispers in a theater

 

mishear: “full and out of the grave…”

 

where beings remember relative to condensation 

acceptance       equals          candle & sea foam divided by

 

Sunflower

your power animal

 

•

 

enmesh , the hornet body plunges

                           aging organism’s charming maintenance

o bully  you        isn’t it   

obdurate

a diaper grail  .  soy Inuit

… static

 

         wrung out to a fine ligament

willing it to frequent

 

•

 

some of them are walking

some are walking away

some are being walked away

some of whom are walking

others

others they are

walking

walking or being  walked away

some of them are others

some of them are walking

others there are walking

or being walked away

 

•

 

(Star Witness. aches in pitch, in patches of chords, curves the road in phrasing’s sift-bounce, shards slide in upon surges, reverb contrails spaces, memory’s soft collapse, a round ricochet chance, round choice in season’s celebrations, skinned knees & rim roses, cajoling sieve of thought-about, what else have you brought, black at the back lot, brightest night parked round parking light, casings & bows, “oh, how I forgot”, how this town rounds itself off in forlorn leaves & bleedings, does it seem here one can do without anything, “moves like she runs” & she leaves with burnt orange for the sky key’s twang

 

•

 

upstairs the talk is of

idols. here, whipped shadows –

the flag beyond the mound

 

speaks a calcified house of mirrored bone

“no wonder what happens to beauty”

finger on an oil cake button,

lurch of the fodder beast

 

•

 

(Summer Reruns.Some heat remembers to turn itself open to secret gages operating peak unspoken capacities, but we, trapped out with sweat of ten centuries lived through since our last pyramid escapade, can’t (how could we?) seek fading traces of any line of reason, let alone control   curtains once steady in winter crisp, now in fabric puddles amid the front room’s piles of cut ribbons. A few discernible fragments: a nose of mirror, some useless type- writer keys (all symbols, characters only interested in rare appearance for illusory sense of complexity). Now you stand slowly packing, &, in a rush to document such collapse, – inevitably (sneaks up perhaps through an admitted self-deception), I’ve forgotten to pack the back of this raincoat – a lesson remembered since initial shocks of pre-recognition –  standing at the window watching mountainous cloud coverage collapse in a slow soak, curling steam line beginnings running together after with recycled products of memory that come not in detail but trail slowly, over; how you cannot run from a rush of hot rain, though once you are caught downtown in it, with an armful of used clothes to sell, & ready to meet the rush heel-on, you find the storm’s, somehow, without notice, slipped behind, and then beyond you

 

•

 

failed clasping what escapes

droned in one reflection

 

misreading “erasure” for “pressure” –

A bicycle carried down stairs.

 

Walks in winter begin as white fills

undoing what pleasant fakes

 

The deer is as dark in the yard –

 

go back inside & think upon misaligned

adjustments

 

slip from distraction, but asleep

maybe fall in w/clothes on, or  wake up to

 

content is the gravity  

form falls through ,         into

 

•

 

                                     a night is

 

                                     loose on us & so

 

                         the want is great in

 

                                       both / to hold

 

                                       each, as close, 

 

                                       a night is, so,

 

                           one into the morning

 

                           Polis is This

 

                           dying from thirst –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew K. Peterson’s E·ratio 16 selections will appear in some deer left the yard moving day (forthcoming from BlazeVox).  Previous publications include karaoke lipsync opera (White Sky, 2012), Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox, 2010) and bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile Press Equinox Chapbook Contest Runner Up, 2011).  Recent writing is online at Elective Affinities, Intercapillary Space and The Offending Adam.  He edits the online journal summer stock and currently lives in Massachusetts.