Interstitial

Poems Sean Patrick Hill

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Interstitial by Sean Patrick Hill Copyright 2011 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-038-5 Library of Congress Control Number 2010934401 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216 Editor@blazevox.org

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Krishnamurti
The poem begins, as one is. Turns discursive: the creativity of mind, something, something. Ends, the difference between promise and provision.

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The Emperors Nightingale

The song goes something like this: A kind of pining binds us in muslin and butchers string. Only now have we begun to see to what extent we are unwritten. Leaves, integers, mothsof course we are machines in the ghost. I never said I wanted everything I touch to resemble gold.

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When This Painted Horse Burns

everything flames. Shots blossom in the barn. Aster bits, spreading creepers make it hard to tell day lilies from time-lapse faces. Carpet of azalea, baby bedrooms, threshing floors, you know what must be undone this spring-torn winter. So shoulder. So suffice. So stitch your cutter impulse, drop your superhuman sleeve and try not to die in transplant. This is one bouquet that will not get out of bed.

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Last Years Clouds

A shadow on stage lifted in the rough hands of the wind.

It happened. It didnt happen. It happened to you. It happened to someone else.

From where I stand, I invariably see shadows of birds on leaves.

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Cover of a Country Song

Note which figure the tree triggers imperceptibly, the night-blind awl, the ingot of blood, the face down grace of grain or a floating groan, a marriage made in heaving. If only the owl undeclaring itself to death. If only the capped well beneath the carriage house. If only the shovel loving the lonely glove, and nobody but.

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When This Freight Train Burns

the names will stop hitchhiking the ghost highway. The spasm in my inner thigh will cease. Cumulus like dented anvils will come close for the kill. Everyone knows when the unmarried neighbor is alone. She leaves windows cracked and valuables on display in a kind of pawn shop aesthetic these junkies are used to. Deer crossing, dearest off-ramp. The dead already remember the knife-grass, the way chicory forgives another injury, the way concrete allows the rain its insistent applause, forgiving its white palms and filthy nails.

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Poem
The imagined field was only an initial approach, a break in a fence over unmarked snow. Like the good Americans we are, we recognize implicitly the abandoned silo in the corn. How is it we forget that some of us are not allowed to remain poor.

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Beneath the waters they are altering your world

eggshells and bones in the trash under the sink needles we pluck from the rug after holidays sidewalk dusted with blue salt grains of which get caught and dragged in under our soles this is the book where the kid runs away and dies in the snow the ghost in the machine were all dying to throw ourselves into

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When This Borrowed Car Burns

well loiter toothless by the sea. Well shepherd ourselves and make new languages of tire treads. Of plover prints. Of anxious dogs. Well remember the black rectangle the gas dripped even when ice scrapes it loose. Beating flames with a leather hat. Windows sucking in like plastic wrap. Well look off into corn fields where we slept as kids. By kids I mean teens. By teens I mean not old enough to drink, let alone speak the music of raw bone and muscle. How could we? We were eighteen. The tent was filled with smoke.

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Facebook
The body as text and as attachment. Someone following my comment thread. Someone writing on my wall. Someone subscribing to my feed.

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Moon reflected in a moving window

Cassidy laid his head like a zinc penny on the track. At five, the freight arrived from Omaha. A dog barks at the moon reflected in a moving window. Skin thickens around the ankles of utility poles. Weve heard the story at every crossing, walking to the factory: Kid wearing earphones full of noise, deaf to the afternoon. A reporter walks to Batavia, site of the train wreck. A passenger sneaks away with a satchel of dope and calls a cab. Coming home, my great-grandfather found the crossing guard, Body torn into two defeated countries. Two ankles across metal bruised the color of a puce sky: Two eggplants dangled on thick ropes like dictators.

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When This Glacier Burns

youll know theres always something stem cells wont reveal. Even the imagination can play the tyrant. Building monuments to itself with its arm saluting salute, solution. Salud. Is this the root of your inner gorilla? Is this the latex mask you pull over your mouth? The costumes my father constructed for me lasted longer than he did as a father. Theres your animal. Theres your natural history. Of course I like zoos, but I also like the idea of clouds climbing mountains. The milk river a result of something dying on high. An eroding slope. Brutal spade.

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Ghost Ridge
Government men plow fire lines around Inspiration Point, the sign overgrown in thickets of ash. The smoke jumpers believe surveyors drank whiskey, which is how the maps ended up crooked. Stone hut on a burn full of deerflies. Sundial on a grave. A girl carries her doll to the mountain. She hides its face in the ice.

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Blue Star Highway

My hands flap like birds near oceans, and I calm them on your skin. Witchs hair makes good tinder but leaves tiny pinholes in our shirts. Sky a scattered ash on tempered glass, light a continuous dappling dark glasses only make worse. We sleep, sand in our pockets, in the pilot house atop a drawbridge. I dreamt I crossed the ropes to touch prairie smoke.

Macadam and tar memorials, prisoners in yellow vests bagging trash. Im thinking of the elephant book you stole from the coffeehouse. Moon cresting oblique dunes, your knotted hair, dirty feet, your black thread in a pail. I cant find ships I spotted in trees, those Horizon Lines. The enameled tin signs for engine oil, the busted stringers, red-eye flights.

Tarkovsky said, the aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers, but I never said I wanted everything I touch to turn to gold. Whipping, splicerather than invent a new language, I want to remember you examining hitches in a shadow box. Theres no way you can draw a knot, you said. The artist never gets it right.

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When This Isinglass Burns

well say its done to rags. Done with mirrors, this valediction. So let me melt. Let the wood burning stove become itself: a tapping wrench, an overturned boat. Making a martyr of yourself is hardly an excuse for sleeping on hardtack. For swinging the adze and for thinking you can swing an adze. For making like Ulysses, petitioning Calypso, envying choughs their business with the sea. You say your heart is not ironwood, that you do not wish for winter figs, that you only long for a world of men to kill a few.

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