A Negative of Speech
Mark DuCharme
Memories erase us
& Mirror what we’ve never seen
TV in the
Corner , silent
Plays
Images destroy the flutter
Eyes presuppose reflection
On taut surfaces
Between
The self & night
Light spills across
The trace
Calligraphies that cross
usout
Too late for what
Had been brought back
In calypso shadows at
The opposite of an onset
Where ordinary rains burst forth
& Tinted housing rusts
The man in plaid is fraught with shadows—
But what does the cold wind portray?
No stars, just furnaces—
& Everywhere we’d ever thought
We knew, but almost stood
Gone outward & astray
Mark DuCharme’s recent books of poetry include We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Film (The Operating System, 2018), The Unfinished: Books I-VI (BlazeVox, 2013) and Answer (BlazeVox, 2011). Counter Fluencies 1-20 appeared as part of the print journal The Lune (2017), and other work is recent or forthcoming in Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Ethel, Human Repair Kit, Monday Night, New American Writing, Unlikely Stories, Word For/Word and Noon: An Anthology of Short Poems (Isobar Press: due 2019). He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
