from Counter Fluencies
Mark DuCharme
21
A frisson is an emblem on your tongue
In afternoon parks exposed to no rain
Exposed to the tunelessness of any Other
When afternoon grows dank
A frisson is an explosive in your loins
When all is daylight burning
When all is night escaping
In our dark, imagined voices
Which bend the wind like grief
23
The insatiableness of writing a line
At the onset of July
Is drowned in all our hearts
We lose us—
Ghosts
Of past clatter
In the clutter of the passage of days
That it is July &
Not so. A glazing
Rain
Insists
On divination
& The weight of the tune that burns us
In the wait
& Weave of what’s not
Needed
tornapart—
Filmstock burning, interstitial
Losses—
& The snare of need to investigate
These
& Every mechanism in which we burn
In thought grown quiet on the tongue
Where I am frayed, & night returns
Like a demon lover to a bed of stone—
& The weight of the tune that burns us—
24
Sometimes, a line is faintly
Drawn
Into dark
Summer’s flicker—
In the discernible
Slip (“Nightfall as
Burial”)—
Or the memorable &
Odd
Fragments
Peopl’d with
Suggestion,
Peopl’d with
Our cries—
32
There is no beginning nor
End to poetry
We have to maintain
The integrity of our
Lines, if not our
Borders
Open your borders & let us
Sing
Complicate borders, but resist not our teeming
•
When resist
We bloom, then rust
Our airy selves
Despoiled by lust
Stained by hate (our borders
Compli-
cate). Why shouldn’t such
Fools, we primates, sketch
As selves, become our hot
Complications & complex-
ities of grief
Where we feast upon
Ourselves & all
That’s new
If only we ‘knew’
If only ‘we’ new
33
In the mirror where I rankle
Subject to objects’
Turbulence
•
Say it again: writing starts
& Stops
Why am I so free?
•
If I write a text
That so means
How can I tell it—
In the words, their bricks, & in
The chatter of my neighbor
On her phone & balcony?
•
I take in the smell of the ‘weird’
It is uncompromising
34
How do you live
In a space with no
Going off to?
How does the next
Word come to pass?
& The next, & the one
After that?
Locating sites /
Cities / centers
Of pleasure
In the grope of an eye, in quick-
Tongued grace
In this propensity we’ll call place
35
Part of this haunting remains
Remains broken
The detritus of lakes
In the eye of the moon
O sing to me
When noon is lost
& Angels stir in the dark
Throats of sailors humming
The tongue is silent
Like the bees
The cat does
Her best
To lure
That bird,
Imitating its throaty
Cackle
There are no fish singing
The fine
Cactus hairs
Have been pulled
From the fingers music is
Endlessly new
I am swaying
The cat now is playing with the hippie cloth’s
Edge
Dare we stir or enter
In the tether
Of belonging—
36
Being monsters in the exact
Sway
Of which skies are made
Of glass
Imagine sky as a series
Of crushed vocables
Any of which would empty
Us
Of past & future
Selves—
Of mirrors without sight
If you subtract your body
From the light
Reflect thou on what scorches & has
Scorched
Cooler & with flowers surging
Through dusk’s ancient panels
Mark DuCharme is the author of The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVOX, 2013). Other volumes of his poetry include Answer, The Sensory Cabinet, Infinity Subsections and Cosmopolitan Tremble. Counter Fluencies 1-20 was recently published in the journal The Lune. Other parts of Counter Fluencies have appeared in Futures Trading, Indefinite Space, Noon, Otoliths and Spiral Orb.
