If among the waxwing's flight, I describe unbroken light, I describe water among the sleep of birds. A wingbeat governing swift fluidities of form. Dear precious, dear dearest: Here I seize on a sea a pure white vessel's breaking. Over many days mistaken for a cloud, a man's eye creeps up the branches, eats the gray buds. He thinks of white as his sun at night. Has he ever thought his impressions are born? Pouring his confinement through a moon's milk stare, first daylight drains this strange bird: attention residing in a nexus of recurrence. Old ideas that cause the mind to live among bright objects—but only as a means of concealment. Each glance is a distance I simulate. When I require a political economy, I look directly at the sun. Sucked through September's pulse, a solar hinge no hand can touch, sound ascends daylight. The eye is made aware. The boundary is birdsong filled with ghostly listening. Or the color of the sea approaching the clairvoyance of the artist's attention. Weaving his periscope from the dark of inquiry, it is made vessel by faintly visible seashore. A painter is the world conscious that light belongs there. Reductio ad absurdum. Until a parallel ear forgets. A duplicate canvas engulfs silhouette with particle fire. Here a moment of sculpture tears off its crisscross veil. Monadnock, my mountain home: These rocks are thresholds that multiply Praxiteles. Where dewdrops further elucidate the majority of tulips, root outweighs flower head, twilight, Promethea Sphinx. In the absolute detail it descends, a leaf's inverted vernacular. Out of which one ruptured katydid proceeds, eternally convex, transverse, beneath a breath of moonshine and meadow grass, a shadow's arrowy vehemence.
from the bookFURTHEST ECOLOGY / Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
"The rug is unlike any other. A dear friend, the artist and philosopher Erin Manning, made it using different patterns, shapes, and fibers. She employed varying thicknesses and lengths, ranging from tall tufts to the untufted woven base of the rug. A topological marvel, the rug’s outline is map-like and the intentional hole is a revelation....The rug is the beginning of a new world."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
“Is there an objective world? One of the older, modern philosophical questions. Yes, well….yes and no, is my answer to that question and my poetry’s answer. Whatever objective world there may be, I have only limited access to it as it does to me. What is most real abides not in an independent, verifiable place outside myself nor somewhere hidden deep inside me; rather, what is most real grows in the meeting place."