Today: Sunny. Highs near 20 Degrees. Winds Northwest 5 to 10 mph.
The Weather Channel forecast for Weld, ME, January 23, 2010
1
a bird hiccups in flight
its outstretched wing
slicing open the sky
bluespattering the depths
of a moment
2
that’s how blue
the sky was
this morning
3
the sky over the lake
was elegantly
fractured
like an elegantly
fractured
ice tray
4
the moment doesn’t pass, it bulges,
then collapses, then is sliced open
by the wing of a bird
5
spilling out
the guts of the sky
6
like a thousand
shiny quarters
7
somewhere in the future,
a frozen lake
stretches its spine
and *boom*
flashes
of former devotions
bloom
like mayflies
8
so let’s make love
go like this
with its hands
so so s
o
as to eclipse
the projectorlight of the moon
which is blue
which is entirely
deciduously
blue
9
like a shadow puppet
unclasping bra straps
(birds blasted
out of the sky)
into unfamiliar frames
of reference
upon
reference
10
blue vomits
itself all over
itself
after a night spent
under the weather
11
above a frozen lake,
a bird hiccups in flight,
its outstretched wing slicing open
the sky, via jagged compulsions,
absolving the blue
from the blue:
a thousand shiny quarters
tumble down
12
like birdsong
13
a thousand shiny quarters housed in former-jukeboxes
14
(which, in turn, are housed in the smoky arcades
of our youth)
perceived through the wild vaginas
of time
15
that’s how blue my sky was
for you
16
blue, as in, I’ll kill you
17
the blue being a phenomenal teller
of fibs
told the ice-fishermen
the only cure
for the hiccups if you’re a bird
is to swallow the sun ten times
real fast
18
told them: slide your
quarter into the slot
and hope that it
forces its brethren
off the precipice
19
jackpot:
even
my blind spots
wore mascara
that’s how blue
how blue
20
I entreat you
21
to describe the meadow
as a “green incarnation of rain” (Ponge)
22
or to connote fog
by saying:
“the tree stepped out from the gray jelly” (Patchen)
23
to say, simply, “I love you
more than anyone could
ever do” (Spicer)
24
I want to undress
the parlance
to unclasp our handle on common grief
until
fear is laid bare
is finally
utterable
I want my love
to bear
to smear you
with the magenta
of newly explicit
endearment
25
to believe:
“The sun comes loose
Like the bright orange thread
I used to bite off a new pair of dungarees” (Stanford)
26
or:
“I watched the clouds
Mosey over
Like blind men
Picking apples” (ibid)
27
the new moon rose vivid
in the wet dream
of my daughter (unborn)
like the thumbprint
of a serial
god (born again)
28
or: the moon held its breath
through the tunnel
of suspicion
(filled its cheeks with
the light at the end of
the image)
29
the moon’s guilty
of divining
the wild vaginas
of the moment (public)
lovespattering the depths
of a moment (etc)
30
“The moon is a white mouth eating the poor heads of trees” (Patchen)
31
the sun went *pop*
like those little
white packets
full of minerals
that ignite
when you huck em
at the handsomely
fearful
32
(housed in the smoky arcades of our youth)
33
why do birds,
when dying,
become something else
entirely
become nearly
(perfectly)
suggestive
34
the way this poem
becomes (perfectly)
moonless
35
as in, come here
o come here
(that’s how blue
how blue the sky was)
36
to fib:
I scanned the price of skyguts
of lovesong
of elegiac
birdsong
with my uniquely
bar-coded
handle on grief
on want
so as to make blue
go like this
with its
mouth
(for you)
with its
impossibly
cavernous
god-mouth
37
I don’t know what
there isn’t
to say
anymore
38
red splash of fish organs
in snow
that’s how blue
the sky was
January 23, 2010 (Weld, ME)
LUCAS FARRELL is the author of two chapbooks: The Blue-Collar Sun (Alice Blue Books, 2009), and Bird Any Damn Kind (Caketrain Press, forthcoming 2010). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Jubilat, Diagram, Cannibal, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. He co-edits the poetry journal Slope and lives and works on a goat farm in Vermont.
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