Poetry/ Marc Vincenz

In a History of Half-Light

In all these measures, in the fields, across the treetops, into the crag and bluster, the muscled-in, the go-without, it goes without saying, and this ain’t saying much: it’s easier to love fragments, those scattered confections of a journey.

From the coast you can see the flashes and inscriptions; and how you whisper to the water in the evening river. How marvelous too, the sound of the bees on their way to making honey. In the anointed hours when the dirt pricks up its ears and a pigeon is caught in a snare, the grapes ripen and the sky nests; the birds loosen, the sun runs into the depressions, into the sewers or deep into the earth glazed over in pitch. The nettles and the sunflowers harken on wings of insects that meet on the black thorn crowns where the sea-green pupils of the damselfly stare straight through the dark honing in on those intervals of a third, the dance of fire, and the wrens in the marshgrass flow-less in their seesaw, painting inscriptions on the rocks by the river before their leave, never to return; and the spark that flooded the ashes in all measures, enters its hive with its wings full of pollen and an idea.

Disillusion

Blue overflowing from the forests.

The froth of the creek.

Under the cover of trees,
a man sleeps—dreaming
of a room within a house

on a hill—so deep
he will never remember
the days and nights before.

There on the washed wall
of the forgotten,
composed of letters
describing the absolute,

that thinking of the thought
with conflict
before the thought awakens.

Two parallels fleetingly meeting.

Imn this state of being alone,
every sentence
repeats the past.
⬥

Geese migrate blindly
into he cataract of sun.

A Number

Happily discarded.

Not By the Skin, By the Teeth

Caught drunk once more on a wild sailboat ride, staring out into the ocean’s salmon-streaked horizon.

Who says it should have been otherwise. You recognize that all this, and all those theories are seductive, bold-handed, voiced precisely; and yet who sent you this message?

That poem I read the other night after listening to the woods and you sleeping in the garden with the worms.

“It’s all fractal,” you said, almost mockingly, pulling the creatures from your hair. “Watch where the arrow flies on another fine day.”

MARC VINCENZ is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction, and translation. His work has been published in The Nation, Ploughshares, Raritan, Colorado Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. His newest books are There Might Be a Moon or a Dog (Gazebo, Australia), 39 Wonders and Other Management Issues (Spuyten Duyvil), and The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, forthcoming 2023).

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