Saturday, May 16, 2015

"Beyond Fluorescence" by Julianne Buchsbaum (2005)

Soon this place will go strange on us in the white afterglow 
of electrical storms, the skin of winter,

in the Dammerung of a power outage, I dream
of downed wires and the picked locks of neighbors'


homes and all the houses on the street where I live,
the bars on windows, the sense of threat and death,


because when slag glows on the outskirts of town,
it burns all the hands that come near it, all the eyes,


wildflowers, all things that fire hurts are hurt by it,
even insects lose their wings and float down flooded


ditches. Soon there will be no one but strangers to take
our place because somewhere at the end of this place


is another place where animals materialize by the highway,
where no one will know why you went when you left


that morning with no license or address, your face already
roughened by the moon, umber leaves, with a madness


for anonymity, at the edge of a hint of a garden, no laws
to follow, gleaming, towards the Northern horse latitudes,


past the cattlebrown of cornfields, beyond fluorescence
and leather, beginning to renounce what you had stolen,


leaving alluvial deposits of land to fence and feathergrass,
forgetting fires that burned, glass that broke in your hand.

2 comments:

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  2. We didn't know it would get worse, did we? Love this list of what we know to be true. Congratulations whoever you are!

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