STEVE BENSON 04 13 15
Ducks shot at on a rowboat, solid ice
two or three boys standing by the side of the road
This nowhere has to go Rather I drift off
or walking, heads down, listening to a song
the dial An end in sight
they murmur without meaning to, unconsciously
And there’s another! A rowboat
No one can join them
slides across my field of vision
No one can separate them from this landscape
Absence of mate: the heart gropes for foundation
color and noise It seems the planet
The boat founders on shoals found way out at sea
Earth is everywhere leaves in all directions
No cheap tricks please
a mind surrounded by rubber bands
Scattered like autumn at the seashore
scoundrels and sycophants you and me
wet thickening in decay no matter
our eyes tied together with nots strangling identities
Only very temporarily is mass mass
but all the same we are glad to be home
A sense of temporality like layered gunk
where the categories don’t matter anymore
all identities becoming elastic and simultaneous
murky with portent. Our nation informally
since we eat out of the same bucket
declares total war on an ersatz excuse
Ghostly children, also ourselves, climb in the trees
for a would-be state, itself more powerful
fall to the ground disguised as leaves, apples, snow
in its magnetism and lethality than drugs
Words make me dizzy. I love
or entertainments we could throw at it
the apprehension before things change
as they always change
What are we discovering? What are we doing
differently from how I’d expect
The effort and the angle turn me, listening
Meanings and continuities advance toward the verge
into the ear of the shell, to water
of annihilation in the gap between ciphers and lost
where I belong, to the current
to the tides I welcome longing
One good thing about rain – you can hear it. Not snow
to disconnect to be alone in raptures
Keep it simple, humble, local, momentary – I agree.
“Where do you get off?” I hear them say
Alone on the hill in the season
Words fill up space fast. You don’t know what hit
when soldiers of fortune pop out of the meadow
you when the crash triggers the air bags
with increasing descriptive specificity
An empty pause in a luxury apartment lasts eons
the world (her) heaving on the brink of her (its)
a togetherness without context, or nothing to attend
expulsive wish
Civilization and its disconnects, unearthed
which might be a wish to die a wish to live
on, to survive, despite everything in code
in a field of ambiguous organization, a meadow
the meaning’s oblique anyway
with oddly shaped plots of raw earth and stones,
and not for sale. It’s no one’s property
to one side a row of sunflowers, bordered
neither female nor male to die for
by grasses growing taller daily, maybe alfalfa
a mission greater than one’s understanding
sneakers on the wires boxers on
[02 19 – 03 09 2015]
A NN E X P R E S S 2 0 1 5