a chapbook of poems written 2006 - 2009
by Lee Posna
Root
Whaling
Heliacal Aporia
Love
Five Sprockets in Norfolk Time
Sonnet for the Human Septapus
Healthy
On Neptune
The People in Animals
Your Turquoise Tortoise
The Sunfish Exits Its Quantum Continuum, Entering the Poem
Four Poems Featuring Ants
Exit
Survey at Noon
Midwestern Chorus
Midwestern Chorus
*
Root
His legs sink like
barges in lava.
His horses snort in the icy radish field.
He lures them into warm rain,
sings to them.
They understand the melody.
His lungs enter
the earth floating through
crust and junk
searching. He was generous.
He made up our beds
for a dream of tires
at the river bottom.
*
in my stratified dreaming: the
ocean
emerald-packed with whales weaving
in pulse-sublimed
murk. Calving
in the afternoon dark.
Resting past one another eye
to eye. The exponential shadow
universe of the eye, probing.
Glass
gaze of a twelve-tiered
funeral and just a slow marble
more than indifference. Here
this lampless dungeon all
gelid with dream-sized
sperm of the survivor ocean
growing
its flower-children. They do
starve and sink, negotiating the dead
to the seafloor
or between the hallowed
ribs of Earth, rolling down a
wall
black as womb.
The fresh ocean trashed with
plastic,
bottles, fathomless foam. Pyres
collide in the wet
probab. waves.
When the whales go to breach they rise
to the tinsel garbling
varicose sunshine, emerge
to broad air. Poke into the
shimmering
serotonin of the adjacent
world of light.
world of light.
Miles from the beach I hear the
blared
ambulatory dirge of the
huddles.
Communicating the magnetic
embrace of hunger, the many
resignations of a mother, the
confusing
crowds. Their song, toward the
ocean
ceiling, re-clouding the sky,
up
up into the first dream where
I’m prowling the bad harvest
toward
the steady north.
One acts in
the light
of her mother, dreams are hills.
of her mother, dreams are hills.
Faces and
friends gaze out
contiguous
dreams.
Sleep
trees. Sleep memento mori.
From the bus hills blow
From the bus hills blow
as clouds
light as thought.
Sheep wander umwelten, light
the cosmos like
Sheep wander umwelten, light
the cosmos like
wind
gossips grass.
Half-sleep clair-obscur as cloud,
thoughts
naked as late
afternoon,
hilly as speech
before
thought—words
that lead
into bad or thoughtful
light—the
kind that shines
on a wide, warm farm.
on a wide, warm farm.
*
Garnets darken a
stump.
There’s the red
carpet in me
and the one in
you—
they meet in the
centre
like children. We
roll
as egg from spoon
into sun.
Into the canopy a
green balloon.
Though
the cradle
endlessly rocking
slows—you can see
it
in the country—I
foliate, I love
you.
A rabbit there
studies
erased in sun,
the carpet unrolls
as we push it, you
know?
*
Order and truth were born from
heat
-Vedic Hymn
1: the spotless
Order and truth were born from heat
and the sun from the sea was saved.
In brilliant grass I take a pew
in the shine that cancels all roads—
once I held my mother’s leg.
2: two horses
Here is a fork in the word on its way:
the sylvan folds in the sea
and the seven fields therein I dream:
the waterways at the end of the earth,
the disease of knowledge and its green cure,
big rigid clouds,
two horses born under one colossal Norfolk.
3: Auckland
Here is a city, here a tower.
Here is a tower like a tree, but taller,
stark as Ruapehu on the Desert Road
and the farthest Antipodean bean
found by dream and wind,
the mouthings of clouds in wind
empty around this tower:
cooling trees, Pohutukawa groves
like broccoli
and cabbage trees in the city:
here the Norfolk walks out of belief.
Order and truth were born from heat.
4:
floral foil
Leaving along the stone
English hem of Cornwall Park in Onehunga,
shorn pines and lambent sheep;
I see a camellia in the shape of a chair
and a wet spider shine in privet hedge.
5: the spot
I would find a flower coloured by soil—the hydrangea—
I would find a flower with only myself;
the lustre of schist I’ll find to be warm
and desire displaced in a phenocryst,
and a boulder in the fresh stream’s lush skin
forced into a new breath—
I would find a spot empty of signs and call it joy.
*
Sonnet for the Human Septapus
The human deer encircle the lake.
The human cloud slides.
Othes glide.
The pink sky shares the lake with garbage.
The red one died.
The human tree on its mother’s feet.
The sister’s room against the others.
The parasites in my sister and mother.
The tiny ferns in sea scum left glowing.
The city at night in its magic water.
The human amphibian in the Camden Aquarium.
Are you tired on one hand?
Walled up in one breath
and a private coil of birches in Russia?
*
In your dreams I’m invincible
my crystal shinbones
tsunami of inexorable health
waken far windmills
orange cloud solo. In the fen
I play with leaves not imagining pain—
I’m healthy.
Invisible there, bright
shapes like me I can’t conceive,
can spiders see fireworks?
In your dreams I am evergreen I am
Douglas Fir—what luck!
I conifer night and day.
I’m healthy, but if not
this comes easy to a tree—I
have so many arms
it’s like I was born to let go.
Spring in your sleep I am
without desire
in butterfly peripheries
invisible to gravity.
Dream me factorial
immunity thought mosquitoes
as my chair rages
downriver, entering rain.
Shadow paves west across ranges
invincible on its advancing crest
me of opal trees of nerves
so fond.
*
Under the infant
archipelago bellies
hypnotic the unborn
mariner spins.
Little kidney-
shaped mariner mushrooms
a pulse in the gaseous
vines. Sour
Poseidon, has he been
careful enough? He says,
‘Child, let me see
your face.’
*
The People in Animals
I’m sleeping on my fingers.
At the window the black wind stops,
flying buttress to the rose wind inside.
Frogs and crickets
soften and swell the dark
in civic crescendos:
inherited Chinese lamp-
lit festivals nightly.
Together in bed we process moonlight
composed by coiled dryads that join us.
The squirrel-like flight of our shared vision,
the long larkspur sleep of our shared sleep.
Canaries decompose
in a tree’s booze still composing.
The napping corruptions
and avian heroines in our jurisdiction,
the loss of a foot
in the world, the good.
The paths through the woods
and the thickets where
there are no paths.
The white noise filling the woods
available
to happiness
which, in time,
makes us
disappear.
My snoozing bags a loosened flock
of the day’s anxieties.
My nightmare’s ozone lets out birds,
I’ve been sleeping on my hand
where are you?
Right here.
*
emerges through
the snow in my poem
as from birth
pausing before
the aspen leaning icy
against aspen
I studied its life
from underneath
loose apples
The words came
slow through slow
likely, unlikely
as leaves
Your turquoise sent me
up a snowy versant
toward me
walking and
walking in
the tortoise’s pausing
the snow in my poem
as from birth
pausing before
the aspen leaning icy
against aspen
I studied its life
from underneath
loose apples
The words came
slow through slow
likely, unlikely
as leaves
Your turquoise sent me
up a snowy versant
toward me
walking and
walking in
the tortoise’s pausing
*
from the myriad thence-aroused words
-Whitman
1
Underwater music under rocks.
Unread music under underwater rocks.
2
Falling asleep in ocean sun
a graceful hospital, reading about sunfish
I place my eggs in its basket.
3
The centuries and their watery helix.
4
Magic sinks in fact
music in words
in whelms and inversions written in light
read in water.
Rocks like words.
5
Sunfish
noses a jellyfish huh
goggling
ghost
in
sunshine shafts.
What’s
this floating by?
A
plastic bag?
6
Music rises through x’s & y’s—
blue music through
forms like empty conches.
7
Seas of life from the void,
the marine tree of life.
Words like fish.
8
The word in its wavefunction needs a little energy.
It waits on a wave, true and silver.
9
Ocean sunfish, conceivable always
as sun on water:
happy trails to you.
10
Ocean sunfish slow as creation,
of an ovulation in ocean morning:
the slow cold and its oval omen.
11
Sunfish basking, slowly massive
in the poem,
the poem
sunny and small in the egg.
12
The egg’s descending in ocean
as music through helicon,
a private tunnel.
*
1
A Garbage Dump
Worker Is Confined to Her Role by the Agro Behavior of Nestmates when She
Returns Smelling like Garbage
Confronted, inside
a certain moment she resigns to retreat—but you can’t say “moment” because then
we might hear “lifetime,” such are certain moments in people’s lives.
And you can’t say
“resign” for the same reason.
Truly you can’t
say “retreat”.
What, then, shall
you say?
2
A
Martian Pumpkin of Ash
They
find me a Martian pumpkin of ash
they
bring me to the ashen marsh
and
make themselves a fluid mane
the
first of 17 rains in March
the
storm in their ken and a vitamin in rain
with
uric sashay they deliver a tallis
and
a pink woolen sock for autumn
from
the old black marsh a new leaf
they
turn to the sound of my name
3
Simile from an Epic
When the winds rise up
and flood through woods
rinsing brakes and broken
channels of bark
they scatter loose
and creeping things;
from an old oak an ant flies off,
flung
far from the train;
then she feels out
her road on the forest floor
seeking the chemical arc
up prickles
over leaves
automatic
up dead ends of shoots:
just so, blown from history,
you crossed the parking lot.
4
Image
Pismere crept up
the seven centimeter chickweed
blackened
by
fuchsia
sky
wobble
and froze
*
Exit
Did we own these forty years?
No, they owned us.
Trees looked after themselves, sunsets
(earthturns), Pythian langage
of hailstorms, unlooked upon
yellow grass swim in wind,
the roundness of trees and seas,
and slow little lemon tree
meant anything.
We’ve got a shed
to find when the flood
squeezes back down the apotheosis
of weeds. Hawks christen
fresh routes above the water
trickling through a foothill
of rowboats.
It’s a bright Wednesday.
Like fathoms rowing through space
the weeds around the pearhouse
appear to wither in the blossoming vacancy.
I have a feeling we’ll talk rainbows.
Four deep breaths divided by sun
give me
the puppetry of sunshine in memory.
I love this roof.
So who would help
if your life went south?
Nebulae don’t hurry
even as gnats faint into death.
Regardless, my body can’t stop
coalescing into allegories
with its voyaged leagues of intestines.
If we take a break now
and eat lunch
I think that’s a good way to start.
*
*
Midwestern Chorus
I
lie beyond the fingers of Midwestern chorus:
the
flood carries the community
into
its dark, conical flowerbed and out
the
windward side of keeling affirmation.
A
town in the margins of disaster makes
its
earthworks of a moral order,
drinking
from the human moment.
The
dank, life-death smell of a storm
in
the morning finds itself like an ant
on
the embryo. The river becomes
the
mountain as it gathers
the
quietest intervals of its people
and
says that they are full of words
that
are not the world’s words,
but
tangential and subject
to
the natal blood
of
its furious love.
The
flood’s mossy staircase leads down
to
a mirror in a concave station
where
one can read that old, canonical reflection—
a cold image of met
humility:
wet
eyes like the morning sound
of
a storm returning to its star;
a faint scar in the eye
born
in the soul’s solar reticulum;
the lupine gaze of
original innocence
breathing
in a haven of air
saying,
“these locks are alive.”
That
staircase feels hidden to me
even
as I watch children submerge
with
sandbags—and if I saw that face
in
a dream deforested and broke off
running
to catch the vital shadow…
I
ask for permission
and
directions to the inroads,
the
overgrown paths
that
lead to sunny nowheres
like
channels in bark.
It’s
a feeling in a field
like
a flower yielding
and
I want that thing:
it
happens in people—
the
defended obelisk
stark
in the prairie
standing
in people
where
the sky goes
a
long way. This place
of
civil deliverance
lies
in grass like a doll
and
rises with the rain.
The
lost-sheep urgency
of
the river’s widening health brings them
together
like folks.
The
swollen, ovine river
touches
some folks
right
where they are
like
death,
its
near-biblical radio flow
from
one dream’s golden topography
seamless
to the next, rushing far
below
even as our eyes guide us up stars
and
through the day.
A
single mushroom,
fleshy
cap on a stalk,
an
instance of its underself, develops—
like
a photograph
of
that psychically radial river—while
its
laminar themes carry on beneath.
In
this way the dream-river is
the
fluid road under our visits,
a
night flame in the lumenal hours.
I
can feel the bucolic agency of the Midwestern sky,
though
it means nothing
by
its broadcast, shows
its
humourless penis in
the
helpless new mangroves.
The
unifying flash is contained
in
this sky, where electrons in their clouds
act
like salmon in spring, and folks
communicate
that light blue thing virally
in
their worldless words.
Passing
them I descend to the river
and
walk around hidden in its blood circle.
Our
collective past presents itself
capricious
as a child, pre-grace.
I
see the child,
who
may yet be mine too,
see me,
and
with shame-bent
inelegance
gaze past the sun
toward
my glowing homeland
into
eventless catastrophe.
Do
old men still drag their rafts
to
the water?
Are they laying their
eggs
this year and in the
same places?
Haven’t
I seen those shells before?
The borders are sinking
as suns
into a carapace so
slowly we get up.
The
spectator on his soul’s pier
stands
in a figure of knotted self-regard,
untying
empty boats
until
all that mute missing wobbles
in
its reflection and those physical silhouettes
turn
pink with pride.
I
grow into the flood’s direction
as
it turns right and wrong, swallowing
like
a child the glass-blue marble.
The
inner oil of the river has risen
unsummoned
to show us what we’d seen
in
our fetal hands only that we forget it,
and
it seems that the worst truth was moot,
if
true, conveyed by an empty boat
in
the center. Why should I want to
own
it, the eternal moat, and what
pace
is this that unlocks
such
wilderness writhing, ecstatic
in
the nocturnal flume?
The
air is wet.
The
water goes black
singing
midnight
and
somewhere else.