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This week's offering is from a Clevelandpoetics the Blog contributor.
Tremont in Slow Return
Evening’s shunt and dissemble, November light
wrung from the season’s work shirt
onto cold hardwood, in hungry city of the tall grass, near lake
Blessed Are Those Who Thirst—tonight for nothing
television can slake, commercials for one state over
purpling the air supply. Tonight,
faith seems a white bed of rising steam.
I think of the woman I love, soul of the afterimage,
brighter than the bulb, so that here among the ghosts
punching out, then drawing scarves of beer foam
across Slavic lips, other smog-hearts with old country wives
at home making love to American businessmen, burning
black coffee for one—yes, even here, love is moss-gowned,
bucolic rip in the landscape we’re crawling from, strong
from the day’s sure ossification, the slow boarding of bone.
White lies of distance and flesh, sear-white lie
of myself, of only two and not the holy oil-slick one.
Great gun evening, industrial rev and moan
of echoes coming back off empty warehouses
lofted on the thick accent of history, and the ghosts
bedding finally into the fog of ash. Still they tell me,
the wings that fall across our nightly body
are by lamplight only shadows.
4 comments:
I want to like this one, but I have problems getting oriented.
"Evening’s shunt and dissemble... "
I can't parse this out. What is an "evening's shunt"? Maybe if I could figure out the first line, the poem might open up for me.
That's a good question, and one that I'm thinking about myself. I was thinking of "evening's shunt" in the sense of the evening being suddenly set on an alternate course, like a railroad shunt. This might allow for some of the poem's more metaphysical parts later on. In the sense that the evening switches to some parallel world. Or maybe not. That might be completely off-base.
I like that metaphor of the evening being shunted onto a different track.
I think it's beautiful.
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