Poems
Tenney Nathanson
from "Home on the Range"
section 77
in her own person already saved me, tell a lie to the office. amazed one can’t believe if I came to the director with a plate would certainly drop out of my hand, step on it, say I’m not Elsa, the letter thoroughly remedies fear.
whose is it then? when you sit face to face on the mats, hands folded. sun breathes radiant clusters through your face, salt and moonlight
doesn’t the name keep only in one’s arms. I can hide in the corner, trembling, head and head of Medusa begin and end with please don’t force me to, trace of reproach in it.
the glass in your hand again, self-sufficient, discomfited, putty wouldn’t melt in your mouth, recalcitrant glimmer kept under clouds. servile, surreptitious, syrupy. sold. I am not dead yet. No says no, uh uh.
Girl writing to permitted write to her. But I can’t in spite of everything, several nights any more. this fear your post office my worry shouldn’t a heart if a person designated regretting it here severely perish, disquieted, permitted it.
He turned: blank wall of night there, breathing. stars, dry ground, monsoon mud coming soon, wind whipping the mesquite leaves, tassels cascading the pool, long curved bumpy white bean pods strewn on the drying ground. help. it’s in the bag.
the above would be fragments did we not possess inexhaustible claims. She fitted poorly in the seventeenth century, but in principle a light self-humiliation used to be divided endless sorrow. moving love story and a very strange mountain range whose origin would not
be evident till after the fact, after every fact. torn cusp of wind, lattice of broken snow, the light in splinters falls at your feet here: there, or there you have it, or it has you: bone breath.
distracted and sad, I’ve lost your homeland. all the time seeking outer obstacles. As a matter of fact it’s your ground, Max. taking his hat off or writing a book
three circles isolated, interchangeable, pre-existing. carry the world on my winter overcoat, I’m not clearer. I can only be quiet, rewarded with madness. the least particle of nature –hat, anything else—appears so to the eye colored by B, and B has everything solid correctly. get through this on my own? not sure!
section 82
tragic life, inextricably bound up with the creature, whoever else was indicted. one may speak of the trial taken further, face constantly absurd death all kinds of life alone, adjourned.
No makes your face turn rigid, then it starts to flake away happening right here then
the decisive category of nature is fleeting. the observer is confronted by virtue of shedding light, jagged line of demarcation devoted his life, it has been possible, but also the heart of history, red face of nature fleetingly revealed
in the mouth gaping open to scream, the ten percent dyeing the rest incarnadine cropped frame of your head thinking something else
the rationalist polemic against enigmatic obscurity casts its shadow –is the ecstasy spoken powerless before sound, spoken world rooted a hieroglyphic begins:
quick dead drop through the bottom of the bucket into deep black what? no, is what no says. not even that.
history merges into scattered seeds, memory created between things by love’s playful crystal beast: a rock, chronicle of world-history: it is true.
gathered into a wad of darkness and scattered again, plankton stars, phosphors, souls eructed by the dark bag breathing, wind in the branches —
stoic equanimity in the tragedy of spirit: born, form proclaims its end.
But the letter is inextricably particular. This world could be the sound created by the word, music which would not lie far, a cosmos of reverberations pressed through the mouth of rhythm, rising and falling.