FOUR POEMS, FOUR POETS
NICOLAS HUNDLEY
Gothic Novel
1.
I believe they believed what I said.
I said the vents whisper calculations
worth writing on your ankle.
As a watch on the counter, I said,
I imagined a boxcar inside.
I imagined I asked,
What about the revolver in the hive?
What about the thermos
propping open the book—
what book was it?
I imagined I knew this:
the streetlights turned into dots at the dawn.
The dots sounded like air conditioners
or they didn’t sound like anything.
2.
I have invented this twitch
not thinking of you
on my gurney in the exhibit.
I have invented this:
a statue waiting all day long—
it starts to worry.
It worries a table with years missing from it
is no method for the sparrows.
It worries a fork in the swamp
is no refrain from the gauze.
In the swamp, I asked the spools—
because I knew not who to ask—
“Did they mention a shawl?”
3.
A lens is incapable of noise
even in that hut.
A noise darkens the hut.
That the urn wobbles within the hut—
not worth speculation.
It is not worth speculating the causes,
whether the asterisk caused
her to drop the lens in that urn.
I won’t mention the urn made of wood,
the wooden urn.
I won’t mention what this might entail.
I won’t mention the noise
escaping from that urn.
SARAH FOX
There’s a Human Being in the Ditch
A glimpse of pale lilac (the purple
trick) in the leak the rain made—a water-
color collage in which tin cans and weepy
yellow grasses, a headlight passing, that
cloud overhead, my hand on the car’s
window where I’m stopped at a sign—
undulate dirtily and tremble with traffic.
You alone are real to me, Rilke said.
He did not say it to me, exactly.
There’s a human being at the bottom
of that ditch, but he’s not there.
He’s not even here. There’s a human
being’s voice coating the curve
of that cloud, kicking the can,
bringing buckets of lilacs to the door
of my little summer house.
A human being outlined
on the page, chalk outline,
dead person, alone is.
Every word’s heart conjures
a terrible casualty. You
mustn’t put me back in the cage.
There’s a human being
in my ditch, rectangular,
watery, his echo prowls
behind the bricks of this
savagely real, the wakeful
engine of alertness, and animals.
LAURA SIMS
Ruth
what good is she then
wearing lightweight combs
in her hair in the v-shaped
valley, then far
from the v-shaped valley
on fire: the field
plus everything wood
in the world
what glorified branch reads
“one limb lost from another”
among the tall grasses
the prairie distracts her
from bellowing Mary
whose bloodlines Ruth
has eschewed for some
twenty-nine years
in the storm shack
pulling her hair down
afraid
not the thought
of her drowning in that
but the other, that peerless contraption
KATIE GREENSTREET
informant
“Begin with who was killed and why.”
If x = x,
y = x,
abc = x, etc.
salt for salt
ice for ice
If someone asked, you wouldn’t call it pain.
Sound of rain, the water boiling over.
“one chance”
I lost my timeline.
Now that it’s broke, turning black, something
ticking in the closet (the snow
kept it quiet for a while)
“That wasn’t love—it was longing.”
Everybody has ten days.
*
all from Conduit 15 (Fall 2004), Ed. William D. Waltz
42milespress.com 