Poems and Other Works Online
Ordinary Landscape
Poets.org (audio)
An Ice Age
Blackbird
Westborough State Mental Hospital, 1971
Three Surgeries
Scribe
White Whale Review
Cumulonimbus
Memorious
Lineage
Bird's-Eye
Slush Pile
Lament. For Neil Megson.
Narcissione
Blood Lotus
◊ ◊ ◊
from "In the Mode of Disappearance"
Suppose you want an absence, as you do.
It isn’t fatal but it’s dangerous,
it’s taxing for your neighbors building lean-tos
on the marshy fringes of your tendency
to have so many selves, each one a point
that you keep making in both argument
and space, distorting the continuum
exactly as the theory predicated.
You want, and want, and there it is, you need,
and that engenders turbulence perceived
as thing: a hurricane inside a house.
The weather changes, but it is; along
the sound a lexicon of uncoined words,
a payroll whose accounts are overdue.
Suppose you close the screenhouse windows, still
you’re less concerned with what to say than how
to say it, as it isn’t written in
the manifest, whose products pink the sea.
Until Everything Is Continuous Again
American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin
Edited by Jonathan Weinert and Kevin Prufer
Forthcoming from WordFarm in April 2012
