Dream
The vista here is quick, wishful.
Here’s to coming-to amid a night’s worth of guiding thru resemblance
the words defining their own.
Allowedness, possess, heart ore, ink, inasmuch.
If only there weren’t some gesture for the way the executioner is always a bee
searching the same garden.
Always the smell of trout lilies, just before history.
A spike of sun now on this house
fly,
late and wrong.
Sound
of a shovel in the sky
making too much room.
Everything In Modulation
∴
yes song is seeing and the size of a moment is the half-life of a color in it.
so its duress vibrates at a wave notation mistaken for the fracture it causes.
so something between that balance, something
as if housed in glass.
if one ends up where they end up and before
the rest
and truly feels this is where they ended up.
if one is mistook.
if one insists upon self while in a canyon.
explain the insane mass of prayer in a given
april
when we are so well in its intended liquid.
break its brick, harvest its figment, parade it apart into a land of pictures.
you who go unnoticed where there is nowhere
to go and not
be.
you that pulls together our system from a long series
of dark vowels.
you, believing replica.
∴
yes beyond you there
are limits and beyond limits a blackened prairie redone with gold
advancing
like history, treasure, garlands of strung together occasions of capacity.
we stood in it, saw its work, moment-struck.
brick, glass, steel, bone–– at some point these become the same
constituent.
we talk to see around its prismic space.
less flesh, more mind
less flesh, more mindful
ness.
we know the moon’s exact distance to earth, the worth of a tree,
are having trouble determining the size the brain swells to
thinking about this, what mods appear when it imitates flight, envisions
plummeting
into blue.
then not at all.
we’ve changed the body into the ladder that leads into the same body.
∴
yes there is so much color in the trees at the hour before ache begins.
begins and becomes a snake jaw dislocating,
a three legged table, poor
spirit moving like smoke and the way
it’s filling, somehow or other, what’s never here.
what if carrying around nostalgia were not the carrying around
of a wild amphibian.
what if colors were looser, slipping
into heightened degrees of genuine copper, floodwater, forsythias’
perfect shadows, shattered jaw, to relate
in some way to the tonality heard when someone says
abide.
they
are.
death is.
∴
yes it feels like rain, like many things.
the creek beds dare fill up first
with water and then what water means.
now there is surprise at the taste of water.
a wildness of eyes like necrotic stars and of
the dead,
strange but necessary, a flag on the first noticeable day
of wind of the century from now to when.
name their electricity.
name its serum.
name the yardstick of fade and recall.
see actual thought like a real branch, the impression
it leaves
of a square inch of tenebrosity that is always here.
grant it boundaries.
∴
yes we don’t look like we are
any more
in this p.m. light, in this divide between brain bind and wane
and breeze.
what’s come of the loops and pops and loud tocks
we’ve let into our bodies.
what’s come to the mind alone is a small planet, a song planet.
how to not feel a part of it.
how not to be dust.
the spoken world reaches, wraps the ear sufficiently
before meaning, refuses a standard judgment to
forget, be going.
another daybreak, another headwind, another head full of dark
common sense feeling adverbial in this wind,
another daybreak, another.
we open eyes,
and to build and become and to shake free to build fate a glass room
in the vibrating air to place in it forever the word
stranger.
what is it inside that needs to never have enough words
left for nomenclatures of loving one
self.
life traverses a poem and catapults better noise.
asks
in nether
waves, canorous gas.
the circuit in the dust in the head
with its part tradition part particle part sun-bricked
sparkle
begins again in the final cobalt of the world with a ha.
∴
yes.
head in that direction, gust.
to love the big day death requires of us is
not to not care to know
why us.
a plain old grasp spends days.
moonlight is not the only thing letting eyes
generalize.
not the only evenness
coagulating sign and referent
into occupied space.
our dead are
never known
for what we do not mean them for.
they may only be that orange mortar,
that violet situation the memory of the day, the day’s,
the day itself fuzz from.
their color is recognizable as real gunmetal’s
amidst a dream-like kind.
their door opens somewhere
outside somewhere dark
and into this.
all terminable things of day coming to focus
thru
the
forehead
thru the gun metal.
and still never there.
JOHN GOODHUE received an MFA from University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, and The Daniel and Merrily Glosband Award in poetry. His work is forthcoming or can be recently found in jubilat, The Seattle Review, REALITY BEACH, Quarter After Eight, Counterclock, and elsewhere. He resides in Portland, OR.