Chad Sweeney

 

Notes Toward Making

                           

            1.

 

The moment

revises itself

by angles,

 

torrential light

mingling loss, 

rain

 

scores the wood

to woolen

moss—

 

and phonemes,

mercury nails

welling in buckets,

 

incite words

their agile

rebellions.

 

 

            2.

 

The city aches into speech

of subway tunnels

and exit ramps.

 

Buses migrate over the rise

raveling lights

from this wet street,

 

to tin

souvenir moon.                       

The hills billow

 

in a shirt of fog—

history

 

grinds out fictions,

brick

holds its wall.

 

 

            3.

 

We unlock the piano

to lie on sound:

laundry mat, the cracked

 

stair,

a stop sign stolen,

every block's an octave

 

in broken time,

no two things alike

but each rhymes with each.

 

 

            4.

 

The rain as desire 

fulfilled

by wind beating sideways

 

against glass,

revised to a new medium,

colorless, rinsed

 

flowers held up by no stem

among real cars

deliberate as murder,

 

a woman with one shoe

asleep

in the median.

 

 

            5.

 

Bone fields and beating wind

thresh memory

thru black fire—

 

birds revolve

at the ends

of wire,

 

glittering turquoise plastics

of thought: 

intersections crossed and stirred

 

by awkward

musics,

a dead leaf scra

 

tches the street. 

 

 

            6.

 

Life one moment from now

flickers

beneath this ice:

 

we break

ourselves  

toward it—

 

a forest

of bone trees

stands in the eye's

 

declivities.  Waving

as the night waves

of underwater fires.