Trash Nebula

Would you throw a ball?
A stone cast, and all that,
Into a small objective world?

So you were back then,
Then you darkened in a pall,
Only a chalk trace

Left on the earth.
Fill in all the wilderness,
Will you. I know:

Love me in one death.

This night-glazed invasion
Underswept those with us
And those against

(I can tell you, it was 4 to 1).

At the vacant center,
Unleavened and leavened,
Disks of scrap, skyward bright,

Following you—
Those little bits of iron
Ore, magnetized with songs of praise.

No, we were not satisfied.

Don’t be extinguished,
Your house after all

Was a budding train
Noontime and night.

Even you stand
With open eyes;

No it’s evening,
Right? We could not

Deter you to cast
The unused
            over the shoulder—

With salt it brings luck—
But when were you
            going to tell me

Everything finally
Ends up in the sky?

A Confession of Sorts

The grandmother-babbles
Are hard to fathom.

What folly from that shorthand,
The directions played,
The herd thinned out.

Who made them then,
When there is no wind left?

From childhood we looked out
Into the softness of the world,

The remains though, were exhumed
And entombed—every prophecy worms

Its way through the knots and gnarls
(That’s where the scars come from).

And yes, Rosalie and I drank the sun
In the chicken yard, then stopped

The fountain from spurting-
Sputtering in the light.

A Very Messy Affair

                    for Ben Mazer and Harry Crosby

Not a wonder, a high burden, but botanical,
Perhaps more puritanical, even diabolical, collecting
Shells, diadems, the exalted and exhumed.

Watch! Do you see the rabbit there, bounding
In her grassy glee. The hound is in the woods;
Where there is a witch who sleeps with her

Horse. Some fates are undeniably worse.
See the flower crowns? In my grand-
Mother’s inner eye, there was a fleck

Of something resembling broken glass, meanwhile,
We were all leaning in, out of breath
As she was, except in summer; not a wonder,

A newcomer living in heart’s central stone
Among the high grasses. The fronds of this leaf
Are more of those mute expressions, all

We have read in our solitude, in out anti-
Pathy, all we have read in the dead, in dust,
A flash of instinct, the eyes dart

Here and there, just like Emily and the rabbit
And the sleepy witch and the broken
Glass of my grandmother’s eyes.

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, artist and musician. He has published 17 collections of poetry, including more recently, Einstein Fledermaus, The Little Book of Earthly Delights and A Brief Conversation with Consciousness. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing. He lives on a farm in rural Western Massachusetts with his wife, Miriam, and their Australian Cobberdog, Emily Dickinson.