Divining for Starters (21)

How to initiate a beginning on birthday-eve, the last of last chances, the gaze on accumulation, acquisition.

The long curtains bear an unearthly blue, perhaps sapphire but not lake or flower.

Not lake or flower witnessed and assimilated. Which might propel.

Sounds move above and before me.

I would/would not slough.

Above, the Italian couple recede to a footfall discourse. Before, a predictable residential street in East London. There is little to make of this in the morning, but come night.

The exhausted day uncoils, and I go in.

 

Divining for Starters (18)

The small stand of trees now quickened by a gale, each leaf losing its discrete

And again a rest that resembles languor for the light nearing noon

The unseen, sunseen work of chlorophyll I know and don't know proceeds

The reflexive work of the body apace despite its seeming reticence

Yet I linger on the tree as though it alone

And again a rest that resembles languor for the light nearing

More Than Bone

where the writhe fails
we pass the basket for girders
so very dear

is the truth the right answer or
because such rigid infrastructure
is honest necessarily equivalent to the real

I obey and obey
the pursuit of standards which
evidence mounts against me

convolute is my natural
but 20/20 vision distorts
but shellac peels away

given the heat of writhe

Divining for Starters (17)

In the chill of the ordinary, bereft of season

In the body's malaise, neither wholly healthy nor certainly ill

The pencil rounds the compass's fixed point and renders a new circle on the old

Begging a trajectory for the sake of

Undecided in discernment and spun like a pinwheel

(All motion has some grace)

Divining for Starters (19)

Before the sentence
Bluebells on the mantel
Whipporwill the call to
In the dew in the yet
Into itch and ache into
The field whereby
Seeds aloft declare
Declare whatever the soil

 

Copyright © Carrie Etter, 2004.