FIVE POEMS, THREE POETS
THOMAS DEVANEY
all day dance 1963
implacable in a chair
she sits in the only way she knows how
completely
then much later
a turn
or rather a push
into a place she looked headed
the sound of a clap hits everyone
a door is opened and remains so
and now is she leaning forward
and is arched
towards the floor
her legs mark another space
she has moved
the whole body has moved
shunting the body in this manner is difficult to do
and even to think about doing
it is strange
that this should not be stranger than it is
the chair you sit is not made for this
as the day turns into one hell of a long evening
but you let go or don’t hold on
there is someone else too
a man is moving more lightly more quickly
and maybe more wrongly
is this a duet
or two solos
you can follow either or neither
he is all over the floor
and maybe only a backdrop
or something she is dreaming
perhaps it is he dreaming her
or us them or they us
and now an hour or more later
her feet
have found the floor
she hunches forward and is out
of the picture
her legs are gone
her head gone
silhouettes
as if this could be an ending
STEPHAN DELBOS
Verdant; A Word
I’ve heard
or understand:
two cigarettes
smoked shirtless,
open window,
drifting curtains,
late April,
Montpelier,
junipers, soft
towers, her
womb bedroom.
Dusk.
STEPHAN DELBOS
Exit Letter
These are words of a poet
choking on the bones
of his voice.
Bury me in a bathtub
full of sand
on a balcony in Tokyo.
My shadow goes to Hiroshima.
Every shoe I wore is free
to roam the staggering hills.
STEPHAN DELBOS
Advent
Oxidized, autumn
slows to stop.
The great freight trains
: trees unload
black air. A cavity
gnaws our ears.
To what do we listen?
The wheeling of seasons.
Riddled with hope,
we pitch makeshift stations
in the grifted, intermittent
awareness we live
to death under a canopy
of nothing.
CHRISTINA DAVIS
Futhermore
I.
A man arrives in waves of himself,
is not the one thing
but the arduous path of his
appearance.
He includes where he fuses with loon cry and wails
of the spider torn from the ways it has known the wall,
he is all he has passed or his is
nothing. He is all
he has loved
or his is some one thing.
II.
It’s not that relation fails.
It’s that the individual doesn’t
last—
It would be unfaithful to the change
that is upon him/upon her,
not to alter.
III.
One has to believe, futhermore, in the voyage of others.
We are not taught the far
but to interfere it, to speak of the sea
we would speak of the shore.
We come from a country where even bye
means be-with-you,
where the hurricane is called
by a first name. No strangers,
not even the storm.
IV.
It might have been possible to have been known
if we could each have been introduced
as many people
as the wind is
a child that must raise itself
every single time.
We were given names, but the names are like dogs
that fetch nothing, turn up
nothing. A partial harvest, at best. If the names were not
signatures only but a continuation
of the vein
might have been possible
but for now
one must stay alone if one is
to remain
the Many.
V.
One has to believe (it is unspeakably
hard) in the voyage
of the other, a Ulysses without an Ithaca,
the arduous path.
We are being sent out as surely as the sun.
At the expense of self,
we live. Are therefore self-less.
Self-lessening.
From rooms we have been lost in all
this while, from bodies we have believed in,
some night no one
will not be walking.
VI.
And so, it turns out, we are
instead of stillness.
We stand, instead
of stillness, up.
There will be no epic of stillness.
Friends I have loved.
Father, mother, I have loved
instead of
stillness.
***
all from Zoland Poetry 5: An Annual of Poems, Translations & Interviews (2011), Ed. Roland Pease
42milespress.com 