Instant
A flower, a flame, a buzzing
object; what might be held
in a bottle, or a box that used
to be called crystal, though
it was merely simple plastic;
perhaps in your palm where
you once exhibited amphibians
and other juvenile ephemera
to the delight of your siblings;
or a bean that beckons as if
an unremarkable nerve swiftly
running toward its last impulse:
When we die--we in the collective
sense, rather than the royal singular--
because we were incidental,
unacknowledged, a glitch or
an echo--neither a bruise
nor a blister nor a dent in
the heather will outlive us,
because we were always
racing against mirages,
testing solids against
figments; losing when we
swore we were winning,
in a snap of a thumb
against puckered fingers.
Somnambulance
I lost this poem on my way to you
in somnambulance; what could
have been proof of my existence,
traded for a film made by rapid
eye movements, and the forfeit
of my conscience. It was my mother,
the depressive, who came into my
my room during those minutes
when I was wrestling with my principles;
to untangle me from sheets and blankets,
if only to have me sit with her, debating
what was on the television. As a young
man, my father struggled mightily to reach
a dormant state, and woke up exhausted
at sunrise. There is no bargaining with
the doldrums because you can’t plan
your illusions any more than a prophet
accounts for his epiphanies. They are
the result either of years of effort—or—
in a moment—the release of pressure
in the right lobe, agreeing to relinquish
the argument.
Storms on the Sun
If I could place you at an angle,
artificial or grimacing,
I’d want for you to catch a glimpse
of the singular filaments
cast off from storms on the sun,
then showered down to
our own soil for glut and excess
needed to feed the germination
of our seconds; our moments
and history, our attempts
at what refused to be knotted
though somehow was made
coherent, like threads braided
out of disregarded consequences.
If you like, you might call me
a fabulist, but I can demonstrate
the bias in every fabric;
or how breath cannot be
separated from its reverse
or its opposite. In limestone
and silica, flares, and furnaces,
we are made to bend into
schemes of embrace and banishment;
to glide and dive like certain
creatures facing the threat of metal
or the sheen of polished weapons.
If I manage an escape,
my neck lengthening,
my arms into feathers, I
might find a place in the revolution
of constellations; I might remain
with you, undivided in memory
and stores of patience; and you
might follow on paths taken
by whirling dervishes, acquiescent
to the center and the logic
of a new universe.
The Length of Thirteen Years
Count the days if
you care;
save the calendars
before
they’re converted to
flavour
the air for a
made-up parade,
filmed for a scene in
a movie
no one remembers in
the present.
Or track minutes
lost though they
technically lengthened
by hours
the game my father
detested,
boycotted the
league, forbade
his daughters from
ever attending.
This was how he
dealt with old hurts,
political debacles,
campaigns in which
he ventured nothing
and yet a century
has made the stakes
obsolete: bones
and headstones
extraneous to the epic
he had exclusively
gathered into
an ever-shrinking volume,
because
blankness can go finite
if asked
to retain more than
it is meant to bury.
Right after he died,
I got lost driving
to the airport
though I had arrived,
departed, picked up
and delivered
people there forever.
I had gotten
wrapped up in the
sports commentators
lamenting the
aimless expansion
of baseball games,
bleeding
into three hours,
maybe four, losing
hold of the fans and
attendance figures,
commercial revenue
and television ratings,
the golden goose and
civic enthusiasm
gone the way my
father had, one errant
second after the
other, until they’d have
to track it by nanos,
or yoctos, or zeptos,
dividing the speed
of light by moments
photons take to
travel across atoms, rather
than force people to
be still in a deluge.
Thirteen years later
and they have finally
figured how to gain
control over this
permeating loss, and
I am left wondering
how the physical can become chimerical,
exiled from the city
my father
taught me to love like
a cause,
a principle, or a
fiction.
Jane
Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, the
most recent being My Aunt's Abortion (BlazeVOX [books] 2023). She also
has published four chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, and two novels. More work is
forthcoming in The Healing Muse and Evening Street Review. She
reviews books for American Book Review and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK
literary magazine.
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