Dave Shortt
The Guide so evolving, if not here, then where? under which sky, which diet, which gravitational imprint left on your background? & where are your children, the children, or are they yet unborn? 'all the differences in age subtract from a child's infinity' (& what is it, creating a gloss in the presence of an uncritical angel?) capitals of the cosmos push into sight, lighting up the maps, pulsars debate with stargazers' specialized eyes (that find rest in weeds) taking over cropped fields in curiosity clumped as 'where is anything anymore?' home, remember? dear dandelion, dear thistle, lupine: innocent brats, didn't they grow up into functionaries flying their banners in quotidian dignity? then what flourishes next under sexuality's vision & double vision? the settled ones, trusting (or in fear of) time's chronic intellectuality: gritting their energy (dusty proviso to their state), but what if it immeasurably falters? in the next interval will momentum from oscillating desires of 18-wheelers transport them to a market checkout where a massive distant cousin still forages in uncertainty? lost in the purifying meridian of a fern, a pine, birch, poplar, is an original 'why' droned by a mosquito, but where would the forest go if it were stripped from its encounter with an immobile fate? a smooth & integrated body like an adult dessert, but when it turns swampy will the moon shine down in sympathy honoring in a quiet voice all the tense animals? those who discovered these miracle therapies, are they at work somewhere new up in that poverty-ridden constellation, 'the Great Curve of Learning'? over years clouds morph from randomly tested seed, junk food, car culture's oceanic motion: will rain commute the sentence of a tame audience of corn packed into the countryside like a hungry population? cricket-backed silence & a view across the mountains for miles: added layers of distraction? or features of homage, where the body is hidden, always? beyond the monuments, declaratives were set free, finding a way back to thrill the suburbs like the native wildlife but evidently interrogatives were forcing the next step & the next in the migration of poetry Dave Shortt's work has appeared over the years in several print and online literary venues including: Contra Equus Niveus, Surrealist Star Clustered Illuminations, S/WORD, Ygdrasil, The Pedestal, Blackbox Manifold, Mesechabe.
|