Stranger. Adam Clay

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СКАЧАТЬ enough to know what should arrive

      downstream and what should sink.

      In anything’s undoing,

      we might imagine some notion of ourselves

      but to what end does our mind direct us?

      The throat manages its urges

      for abandonment

      with a mix of care and attention.

      Like departing and arriving each morning

      without much thought, luckily our bodies make

      most decisions for us.

Even a Straight Line Must Curve to Shape the World

       The fire it almost starts itself

       Looks like water comes from somewhere else

      —KURT WAGNER

      My thoughts lost each day

      in whatever linear pattern

      appears at my disposal,

      as if blaming the light

      of noon for a midnight terror

      wouldn’t be nearly enough

      recklessness for all or any

      of us. On Short Street,

      the steeples repair themselves

      into a more fashionable

      version of church: rhinestones

      and glitter, retired pennies

      cover all seeable spaces.

      In my version of the future,

      there’s no need for disrepair,

      no need for scaffolding,

      no need for rerouting a river

      up to the surface. Downtown

      of yesterday and the stones

      remain in the memory

      like reminders of blocking

      out the past. My mind

      in these moments wants

      to return to the linear, wants

      to string a thread from here

      to there in such a way that you

      would think it had always

      been there. At times here the seasons

      feel fake, the summer’s patience

      only constructed for the sake

      of violence and the sake of sustaining

      our voices into the fluid corners

      of night. Eventually terrorism

      will look something like a truckload

      of men driving through this quaint downtown,

      plowing over parking meters,

      resisting all attempts to monetize

      what little open space we have left.

      Of course our sense of terrorism will have

      to adapt—perhaps even you will find

      another use for your spare change?

      Most things don’t make sense

      until they make sense—the birds

      wash up in piles, their talons and beaks

      the only evidence of what they

      once were. In the next minute

      you’re skipping rocks across

      the glass of a lake,

      the sky so blue that ice

      could fall right out of it.

      No matter how hard I try,

      I find myself returning back

      to a logical way of organizing

      everything, and I wonder

      if I could recognize

      madness in its current

      river of form? A day on loan

      can still be a type of day, the way

      the light declines moment by moment,

      and we witness the sky moving

      away from the earth, a wreath of light

      like a vision, like a weariness so divine.

Upper Peninsula

      A bronze sky at first seemed the best way

      to describe it,

      but later the description

      fell away into something

      more vapid or mundane

      than one might expect,

      although the sky did not.

      Your feet doubted the land.

      Even a lawn chair

      falling from the heavens

      would have made more sense,

      and even falling asleep while standing upright

      felt more natural than this.

      What we are is cut into the ground and continues

      to burrow absentmindedly

      into the source of our birth.

      A shipwreck for every misguided

      thought. A sandstone skipped across the water

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