Heir Apparent

Issue #48 October 2019

indifferences | Samuel Amadon

I find I am found in the middle of thoughts

I wouldn’t expect in me. I know my eyes

Are mine, my hands as well, and I keep them with me

As I fit between the day and sky. Inside,

I imagine my life, and find I am

Alive in these sudden rushes of spring wind through

The car window as if

Behind my breathing a teenage feeling ends.

A teenage feeling brushes back my skin.

Everywhere I go things are settling down.

People act as if just now is an invention,

As if seasons end not to circle round

A thought, not to each in its nostalgia drop

Songs I knew first the words were lost.

I knew my thoughts but was interested in thoughts

I didn’t know. The time

I found my voice in a corner of a park past

Where a thicket bent branches, I echoed forward

Opening onto what I hadn’t

Planned as if I planned

A meadow where I might in my own weather

Head home with a chill between my hands and say,

He who wants my thought I put him out of doubt.

As well as I can circle all my days.

As well as I can think of what I’ve bought.

As well as I can feel my face in the sun’s rays.

My thoughts are at the door for what I owe,

I’d hand it over but I’m not my own.

Here’s a story I tell when my wind voice rains,

When death lingering in the flower bush

Scents a cocktail I like on the plane, if you listen

And you know me, how I circle round

Humming what I say not in

Some friendly way, my words over and over

Hold the corners of an order from the bottom

Of the stairwell to the part you’re hunting for.

A story I’d tell if my rain voice would end.

If I could take myself inside and turn the sound loud.

If I could know I was alone then I’d relent,

And sit in my chair looking like I just found out

A story I could tell when I had nothing left to hear.

A story like a star burning out my ears.

My heart escapes me. I don’t know what to say.

I don’t collapse into whatever

Pollen has settled on the white paint of

My porch swing slats

Where I sit with my belly, a bell in the air.

The world hangs before my eyes,

The universe, its thickness,

I range, in my depth, until the right

Desire plucks me from this state—wild air

Catches my eye everywhere like flower pots

Falling out of windows. The days line up

Until they lose definition, round down to

A horn sounding blocks

Away, unsure as fingers I touch fingers to at any rate.

I love the trees when they are patient.

In a world filled with places, I plot

And my head fills with what I’ve planned.

I more more do and spit. I spit. I spit

On the concrete while blue. I find words

Real beautiful. I use them over

The porch, green and sweet,

Orange then, then red back in my car.

A car-made wind takes me now I’m young.

Breathing, my place is full of breath,

A summer month folded out my chest. Words

Fall down and around

Like hair in wind, while I circle a parking lot.

I breeze. I blur. I won’t pull into any spot.

I know these clever little movements break

Something open, but I prefer

Grand things in the air surfaces roofs

Sunlight, which hits upon me.

I am casual.

I don’t interact with every thought. I have my work

In the dirt,

Grasses I pull from weeds yet blooming.

I lose the sun in winds that drift and tilt

Above me. They

Lift me to say tomorrow

Where I see the back of my head. I say

Where I put my eyes my work is done. I roll

My body into garden holes I’ve dug.

The world is charged with faces bright as wings

On a bird lifting to a street sign, while screams of

I don’t know when to do what

Are where I can’t find them with

My eyes. Eastward stream petals

I happened to have sat among, or trod

Where my foot can feel, can feel, can feel if

Not for how my foot’s been spent.

The world is well, and I brood the deep down face

I make, the one I explain

When I do what, when I do what when

I thought I was expected to. Each time

I find the exact same place. I’m very fine.

The world is light and full of grace.

I had a feeling on the face of it a song.

This was in the yard.

Grasses in the wind, passing like the sun

Every morning. Every morning, all

Fresh with the bottom

Coffee of the cup, cool like an acid.

It leaves me.

I had a feeling flutter trees on the face it stops.

I had a feeling alright. I was the tree pieces,

And the wind that brought them

News of a new shadow, a feeling the grasses sat

Tip on end. It was an end. I lay wasted,

Until morning over the afternoon traced

An evening about my face in the blades.