Poem

Here is a great poem by Brian Beatty from his collection Duck! (Brouhaha, 2009):

MY BOOK IDEA

Two ghosts fighting
over an oatmeal cookie

for 400 pages of enormous
Times New Roman --

I'm thinking it's a mystery.


***

I would buy such a book, buy it and read it.

remnant memory

This remnant ark, this hollowed horse
where you hid to hear the owls and
squander blood in the begging bowl
of your hands, it is here you curse
with lightest breath, drift as eye-flicker
in tall grass by the creek with its moving shells,
it is here. Each torn day it is here,
you tick at it with fingers first dabbed
in stiff ink made by what you hold
in your palm, stain-wise. Ten thousand
light-years from now your mother scuttles
on her back to see what you saw:
a man in animal head, shaken, raw.

***

This is a revision of a poem that remains elusive. I doubt it is finished, or even barely begun. Something about an ancient rite is felt here. More than that I am unable to offer specifics. This will probably never appear in any collection, so I give it here a kind of burial.

south of lower waking

It is a mystery to wake
transformed,
a grub
dividing an apple.

I'm beat. Daybreak
buoys the toxic.
Already this heat
opposes magnificence.

Why did we argue
our way all night
toward that cyst
of unwillingness

to let go, that
sac in a seed
of some lesser
climate, embracing.