Postcards from Home

Eulogy

A neighbor and one-time friend of mine passed away last week. This poem was written using the template of Ben Lerner’s “Mean Free Path” which is kind of a “rephrasatory” poem where phrases are recycled throughout the sequences, creating a bit of an echo-chamber effect. I thought the format was fitting for a eulogy, and will just leave it here for whoever would like to read it.

Eulogy
for Jordan Swenson, 1987-2010

Four days after the death of his son,
my neighbor is standing in his yard at 2 am.
Stock image. Let it fall
because the gravity is too much.
He can see the city where he died from here, across
the lake, across the

In his mind, I can’t imagine anything
but blankness. The bare structure of recollection
clinging to itself and nothing else.
The immediate geography. The amniotic glow
of his skin after birth. The city. The
tree. The overgrowth. The wreckage. The

Death appears in my dreams, right on time.
I realized the other day my birthmark
disappeared. Never said a word, just left.
The reductive powers of the close-up
would do wonders for him and his emotion.
But I promise now, really

Not another word about the weather.
This is serious. The world we knew as children
has been startled.
Business men drink my blood at the traffic stop.
Routine. But that isn’t the issue. He died
with agendas, with arrogance, with eyes, with

But the question was about his beating heart.
Avoid the violent psychoanalysis,
just give me the meat. The amniotic glow
of the city at 2 am. It dreams awake
of the dream it has not yet had.
The impulse is symbolic of

From down here, the reductive powers of gravity
don’t seem so much. Blankness avoids
itself. Tell me, in the language of disaster,
what that word is. I am not avoiding the subject.
Sleepwalking, sometimes known as standing
in your yard at 2 am, is what you may call

The tears were, by any measure, free-flowing.
In his mind he was trying to iron out
the psychoanalysis of it all. Not a routine issue.
Give him his privacy for god’s sake.
We don’t talk about that in grocery stores.
No, we don’t talk about

I knew him, though not well.
One time he broke his thumb on our porch
and the two moms argued. Mostly though
one mom was angry, the other apologetic.
The impulse of such a thing could be genetic,
like sleepwalking into the

Business men cried at the service.
Last night I dreamt of collecting lice
and putting them in a jar.
I never thought about it that way before.
As the end of my original mercy, I mean.
And where once was despair, now

They all wore doo-rags in his memory.
He was stylish, athletic, and grammar-
conscious. Apparently his most prominent traits.
Or so I’ve been told. The reductive powers
of raw emotion; free-flowing. We don’t talk about that
on Sundays. Just trying to iron out

The lice escaped before I awoke,
carrying ladders to combat gravity.
Blankness ensued. Why would they need,
never mind. Watch your grammar.
It’s genetic. Not another word
about the weather. Partly cloudy with a chance of

A call from the medical examiner’s office
with the voice of Nina Simone on the other end.
The reductive powers were, by any measure,
just that. And where once was despair,
now just blankness. Sleepwalking
is a form of mercy. Or in other words

Death will take us in dreams. It’s genetic.
Or so I’ve been told. These things we carry:
Athleticism, style, grammar: Flow free
and combat the reductive powers
trying to iron us out. In other words, what
you may call the tragedy of repetition cut short

History of the Item

Thinking of glass,
and what
is often kept under

A delirious
urgency
associated with such things
as when in youth it was understood
that to go and purchase a thing kept and valued
with lock and key on one’s person
was an act of luxury even if,
laid bare as it then would be,
it was found lacking in joy after the amniotic glow of its initial seduction
had worn and withered like the earth and suddenly

middle-aged it falls out the closet and it is thought by the forager
are we not this always
are we not

The night passes, and never passes.

Gone in my excessive want for purpose,
I have forsaken my original hunger.

In this season—in my childhood—
I remember the pure intent of joy laid bare:
my private ecstasy cracked open
like the sudden and prophylactic song of wind
at the midday hour of my bleak and longing memory.

How that bare structure of recollection hangs on
in everything I see:
a bird-drenched, leather-skinned afternoon in spring
and all I can think of
is an old, unfinished sympathy I had promised,
years ago, to a lost and still-forgotten friend.

The Inner Life Dreams Itself In Motion

But what if by dignity, you mean
birds, seasoned by constant shadow,
and I mean
blood, found in the mouth upon waking.

What if, in the constant opening of the world,
you think that everything real, or not real,
must die in defense of the rain, and I think
that everything must die offended by circumstance
and the unwitting impermanence of light.

Throughout all your delicate spaces,
alone with time, you grow a secret life.

Tell me with your face in shadow
something I had known, something that,
in my melancholy surrender,
I had walked away from:
the rolling lake in summer, inhabited deeply
by the moon and the framing
of that inward gazing we call
stillness, hovering, grace.

Anti-Nostalgia Poem #2

The retro aesthetics of modern youth
seem to adhere to the sole virtue
of nostalgia that fading cry that
rootless bewildered misguided trajectory
of phosphorescence speaking
for the self-increasing silence of age

Spring

And it grows,
the bare music
of the rain
on pavement.
Amorous season,
behold the language
in which I profess
to you
the vastness
of my deliberation.
Nothing in me
can be so spare.

Disjunct Letter to a Young Fatalist

Misfortune planted a world in you.

Bruised by the forces of days, blossom still
beyond light.

Death is not your only audience.

You have grown too numerous for your efforts
at clarity; too distant to comprehend the wounds
of color you carry.

I tell you now, dream, for just the sake
of an instant in the eye, of the sea pierced by fire;
the long fence stumbling out of dusk by a field,
overgrown and forgotten in the world.
For the wizened apathy of men
rules here and forever, always beginning,
always absent in the terror of their ruling.

Somewhere between logic and darkness
there is sanity in the world, and even there
everything is still just a problem of definitions.

Take your vanishing steps,
but know also they create you as you go.

And the shadow of the clock is long, but ultimately useless.
Try not to pay it all your industry.

Summer

The force of your days.
Long, unceremonious days.

It is not me who has made poetry,
it is what happened to me.

Said summer
in my ear:
I’m almost there.
I waited. I fell
asleep as I waited.
The porch light
burned out,
it’s delicate space
part of the world
again.