EVENING WILL COME: A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POETICS (ISSUE 11: NOVEMBER 2011)

Richard Meier        (page 3)


Forward and back, the center held in reserve, passed through on the way to the ends that each necessitated a return. A field clear-cut but for a few trees or a few trees to a meadow allowed to return and beyond that the lake shore a boy on the ice had pronounced the edge of the sea, not sure. Not married, dreaming of divorce, a manager with no workers, a worker with a distant boss who didn’t know your face, a knowledge that could be avoided — it had been given to you as advice — for years, a blue spot with a white center too bright to see. Invisibility is another way to be absorbed. There’s a spot where the ice is no longer over the sand and the waves have hollowed it out from beneath. The soldier in his camouflage is more visible than anyone on the train. Shapes cut from a transparent sheet on which the light stretches and bends cover his hands, trees rimed with ice, shapes repeating repeat. 3 men shoveling snow make the letters of the letter-writer’s name, doubled over, flinging, at rest. The frame of the locked bike is missing a tire, handlebars and a seat. I would like to be seen, but not as I am. Covered Wood he always heard when the station was announced when the poem was full of writing, not receding from its subject, but being written inside it, until he stopped at an ice-gray desk and at last saw the sparks from the express light up the walls, recognizing his own motion revolving in its sudden stillness as the frames and passengers flashed past. And there must be a point in the middle into becomes out from but perhaps never a time when through becomes beyond, a value in the painting of gold and lapis lazuli and another one where the train plunges through the snow and the whipped, unaltered snow falls behind. The poet-passenger falling almost asleep inside the sound of his fellow travelers frees the train from the glare of the snow to be reflected in a long stretch of abandoned warehouses, undifferentiated dark stretches of busted out windows, coo-roo of pigeons, and white-washed grafitti, until it sinks gradually into a culvert where two exit and ascend a staircase to the station and the surface, to which the engine and passengers make no more claim than to a cloud. Those two — one seems almost to lead and the other almost to follow — will find the town green covered up, and visit for awhile before passing away. Today the icy sidewalk sends a dozen stabilizing muscles to work at every step, while the flat light brightens at last in the early evening as the street lights return and divide from the crystallized objects, stick, fence post, plastic bag, umbrella.



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