iii.
got up to drive the car into the lakebed / got down
to my tears in sludge. once again mud can also
make a berm. weather colors weather like any
other bad company in its own goddamn way.
i had a sandal tan for two years and was never
embarrassed. the first day it rained i didn’t own
an umbrella. my sabbatical lasted well into baseball
season and after the bicentennial parade.
march me to the puddle where i promise i’ll know
the rest. the forecast said whip around, what’s over
there. the last day it rained i just stood there, no
matter, my sneakers had been wet for hours:
red carapaces splitting open like rotten cherries,
knotted stems caught in a storm drain.
xvii.
i couldn’t even talk about cameras for
the longest time, thanked gawd for the
things technologies crush into a pinhole.
that one image of me in particular, back
turned, a sword of light slicing my leg
in half. it came from gawd’s lantern,
the one out-of-place thing in all those
corners of old watercolor paintings. if
anything can time travel it’s paint: a
swath of color &/or texture claiming a
memory as a field, reducing love or pain
to love or pain’s shapes or elements:
neon, cobalt, iodine, antimony, chlorine /
pinball machine, phantom pain, pinecone
xxv.
twice now
i’ve swallowed
my own
form / formal
declaration of
intentions: let’s
take in a LA
purchase movie
under the
guise of
stupid animals
going incognito:
me, a squirrel
you, the fox
xxxv.
when i was a babysonnet i
took up the exact space of
a walnut. my lines waved
but not how you’d expect:
a shore here
another shore
a city manager with hands
on the dam switch & siren
a crinkle landscape from
one of those mall kiosks
too shiny to be convincing
too sharp to look away //
now, an eldersonnet,
the exact space of pills
l.
in the park, i lie down in the grassy shade.
down in the grassy shade i tell a lie.
a cloud looks like a broken antique accordion.
broke, cloud-like, i tell old lies in new ways.
“today, i will not waste my life,” i say.
i am so very fully completely alive with wasting.
“today, i will garden without fear,” i say.
the grass grows up around me, a familiar
scent hangs over me, shrouds me like a phantom
ground, dewy with only sort of being there.
a long dead new england poet tries to possess me
unaware that i do not even possess myself.
“does the woodpile need another poem?” i say.
the pile always needs another poem.
whenever i need a straw, it’s impossible to find.
i suck the night into my body & send you the sound.
(you tunes his ear to breath, to drinking from a cup.)
were you nearby i’d breathe in yr ear / feel weird abt it.
(a log ride of breath through canals doesn’t bother.)
i breathe in and out and feel weird abt it, too.
(you channels an inner virtue, thinks of sleeping.)
the moment before sleep slices a thin reminder
that you are far, but not away from me. you
recover from memory’s paper cut only to remain
twelve point times new midwestern on a screen,
a mostly-true venue for someone in love with letters
and the voice of someone who speaks in sonnets.
the pile always needs another sonnet.
Nate Logan and JJ Rowan‘s sonnets are the product of one little internet room with a great soundtrack and approximately 2,274 miles. They have been published at where is the river and in the chapbook mcmxciv. (Shirt Pocket Press).
