Nine Silts
Jed Munson
-
It’s not the case that
it’s always going to give you
the negation of the statement.
diatoms siliceous external skeleton
pits or perforations
Auxospores
by the use of whip like locomotory organs.
longitudinal girdles, centrifuging
they screw themselves through the water
they live outside
the scope of this poem, as
Contemporary light pours through a peeling
billboard on your way somewhere
acuter
-
Say something specific like hello to your neighbor,
You remind me of myself without
my need for mirrors
breaking down boxes into boxes.
They were happy with the sleeping arrangement
until the room rotated
around them, putting the bathroom down the hall
in their faces,
the tiles of trapped pennies glistering
as though by a light source
within
diegesis
-
A thing to be reduced through retrospect:
like burnout, prim with the Academy
of Influences. I held my thought
to the alley
wall, inverted
till change fell through motion sensors
and I cried
at the thought of a scene
beyond my technical ability: A tiny house
of percussionists
in argument.
Salvaged
cacophonies ordered
precisely by their irrelevance
to nameable, visualizable
people-persons I’d tried being.
Three seasons have their way
A bachelor for a day
backs into the room pulling
palomas
on a cart—
(As a husband, he
from saved knees fixed things
from time’s tongued acquisitions.)
This clarifies
the lifespan I’m not qualified to make.
If I consider myself as doing the work
I see the building I’m doing it in
I see a concert pianist
redacting sorrow from her corner
of the café
and me,
ego from mine.
If I get COVID from this table,
I will blame the sum
of wood that put it there, the sun
of all I would: I will complain
politics was everywhere soaking
my clothes—
I will light five
fuses
in a cave to view the walls
in the flash before they’re gone.
I will call the sequence
art’s deafening
and misspell everything
-
Negotiate the animal in the field as it burns
without mention
of the party line
—scattering
our interns
beyond explanation: a fate-like prism
of deep-sea glow
settling into a murmur
as if a mud.
Thanking the pit too many times—is me.
If your state lags
after status like an oar at the end of its arc
Why
the riddle tone
admiring the garden?
Probably dotage shrank
your lungs
and the secret agents we’re supposed to be left
standing in art
smocks.
War
refers eventually, its descent
to everything
like tetras before our cries and songs
-
Because of Trilce
I know nothing but suspect
the clovers.
pure traction that gains
no ground,
surfaces
graves
how a gourd lifts water
before gulping
air’s menagerie of cables
-
Are you making careful, well-adjusted statements?
Three geopolitical trilogies
do their thing.
I thank the bug for defining my exterior
The non-native speaker says,
I don’t think it’s about accomplishment,
I don’t know if accomplishment’s
the right word—
the pushback is the perfect moment
to use the word lip
of ground pursed
from avalanching
Can
I make a suggestion?
says the native speaker, her voice suggestive
of a master
class or two.
She says, Help.
in fluent French
to an intimate but stately room
of intellectuals
who may or may not be considering her
for a distinguished promotion,
I’ve been living out of pocket, you see
these nuts in my cheek?
Meanwhile the children are playing war games
in a war
without the orange caps
mandated elsewhere.
Cranes are rising into indecision, shitting metaphors
-
This is an emergency
forgetting the procedure
in case of itself. I was taught the goal
is the last pass into the goal.
the sink
the last
dish.
This is the last self
reflexive thought I can afford
to lose
to judgement
This is the last This
before the first tones of autumn
ocean
transition out of riff
into a corpus.
And my whole family’s waiting there
for me to sleep
-
The animal wanting a new life
descends an escalator
into one. It sees ribs of sun
Along a corrugated panel
Sheathing closure.
It’s not for me to decide
which one of us has had enough
with the other
doors open at a clap of meat
on a counter
It moves relative to me.
Two large panels of cityscape
explain how I should approach
my eyes
widen the distance between them
The world is external to her
while she sleeps,
I imagine
I’m awake to observe this.
I’m not trying to disorient you
to make you nervous,
I’m trying to communicate
How to dodge the rain you stand in
: recognize
The whole earth
as it rises through a grid
The unreality of clouds
-
The frustrated party latches
An off-perfect triangle
to the dark in translation
it sways like the caseload waiting address
In my digression, I left you
my everything
In that barn behind the paddy
where the images take
turns taking place in their worlds.
I came on grant money
and left with half
my liver—a little
fatty
Where winter rose to shackle
I left at first light.
I would never lean this on a car.
This belongs to legs
that’ve suddenly come everywhere
bodiless
Jed Munson's chapbook, Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder, was published with Ugly Duckling Presse. Recent work is forthcoming in Afternoon Visitor and Bat City Review.