The Whippoorwills (poem draft)
These poems, in between prose bouts, are helping me work through things that I don’t discern yet. The different yearnings couple with the disparate styles. One mood is not like the other. Quatrains between poems can be unalike as well. There are inside-out narratives that aren’t secrets.
The Whippoorwills
*first baptist air
The trees of Ohio are not in this guidebook/cross/hill
God, I try to be abandoned and bend
(There’s no way Is there no way?) I see
spaghetti dinners of Red Scouts and weep. tape/vice
drive out where I alewife. Living bark but
dead ravines. I soak. These whipoorwills think it’s
habitat pinata lovefeast
/indigo the way they
keep striving outward into their captures/what/why.
That’s where we are. You,
I’m not.
It’s not God I’m referring to here, Carrier, anymore.
Chains/wins/wine group the rain species of Ohioana.
The calumny
And I am leaving tomorrow without
my splintered send-off.
Either you won’t or my covenant can’t.
The plane/desire/drives
scratches out the
trees. So they wait. Either you won’t or
the folk of jars are trying too hard.
Somehow my gloss. Error
empowers information. Do you know/x/x?
We will travel wait-East, though lone.
*the continent rings
God wouldn’t die sparingly
so I could find the easiest
(It will not be so bad when it’s over.)
Awful courage in the midst
(…these broad and faceless connections where
everyone climbs into the Sweater
of the Wolf.) Deep admiration for math
solutions claws to one surface. I regret/
Whippoorwills have no conscience/appear scratched
True nightjars forgive too slowly the worst
thoughts In which they see the older
Ohio, die in wanton reserve
of You: sun, You do steer though far
The pilot, /(all the while foul)/
marry-sows
the lightless skull.
And more woodworking on the hill.
Though you won’t see anymore how it branches.
/turn this. This free caring has
blacktooth to throw away/a high mountain/a price.
As the spirit untrafficks its writhing
Be mirrored as the least gray,
be countless people also, state as much as
you can handle.
*lust’s nests
To hear and grace the one for you once
only, in a groan that falls away.
Then every year starts another blunt
You’re the ground comma. Or
your favorite song heard
only once and never spoken of again/hours.
Mid-beauty is environment/the most free
parking. But you’ve carried airports arc before. The
comic strip diseases enter history of sap biter.
Birds were here long before/absent but here
And I’m hundreds of miles… God doesn’t/mind
Oh wow, not what I meant at all.
*the claim
waiting for baggage-
you won’t know
this/living
I know less, it’s
less rule again, guess/wine
again
One life
starting, and
another is yet another
My attention misses
matter. Full and empty matter.
I heard your/weeping
volumes in the
foundation/replanted from Ohio.
Recorded vineyards/passing
They rotate Small from
sugarclouds, real in whippoorwills’
your cries. Give to stolen It
falls this wave, /the
next, loves in crumbs.
