Stranger. Adam Clay

of Where We Are

      Plainly spoken, I am responding to you.

      Despite our best efforts to will it shut,

      the proof of the world’s existence

      can best be seen in its insistence,

      in its opening up. Should we get lost,

      let us be lost in a familiar space, surrounded

      by every motion of the unnamed and unseen

      until the moment they appear. With the sofa

      in a slightly different place this morning,

      the room resembles a dream of the room:

      the details remain present and realistic

      while everything bends toward one wall

      in particular. I know what you want,

      but the wind will not concern itself with us.

Northern Lights

      Light or even a phrase or two

      erased from the mind

      like a once familiar street razed:

      buildings destroyed, moved

      elsewhere, tucked into the folds

      of a tornado (you hope)—

      One thinks many times not burdened by

      but along with the clock—

      Of course, it’s a pleasure to arrive most anywhere

      these days filled with desire

      but once the mind’s dwelling place becomes an ice cave

      love defines its own tributaries with pine needles

      or another way to say let’s only speak

      in the absolutes of morning, free of comparison,

      of a drifting scale tipped to an almost perfect balance:

      none of that language needed now

      between meals, between the future departing from disaster,

      and once the mind slows to the point of regression,

      then what to make of the first memory arrived upon or within

      for you what would it be and know

      you cannot know what it would be for others—

      Even in their telling

      there’s an orbit of masquerade around which no moon

      could ever exist nor would it want to,

      no perfect circle or symmetry to dwell within:

      once the trees did not need their names and the night

      needed no voice, it needed no knot

      to unravel, it needed no one

      to explain its madness to

Disruption Without Shrapnel

      An admission of a river’s deviation from whatever path

      aligned to the stars, you clip a word from the mind

      until it forms its own kind of mind:

      a curtain meant to protect nothing, no castle of sky

      creeping into view.

      And what of the morning?

      The newspaper troubles whatever glow

      defined by the light.

      Don’t worry or wonder—

      the world contains enough rubble

      for the weight of every

      body and for the weight of every body

      we might imagine a space filled and emptied

      again. In denying yourself

      you deny a crucial part of the storm.

Along the Edge of a Season

      Distant roads brought together

      in a way described

      as anything but pliant. Instead it seems

      normalcy might suggest a stifled inspiration

      destined to exist

      as a hallway exists:

      hidden between the rooms,

      the Iowa of a house,

      the Tuesday in a week with no Wednesday.

      Somewhere a truck

      does not turn over. It seems

      there are no middles

      anywhere—there are only

      logical lists in sensible places.

      Perhaps calling my view

      of the world palindromic suggested

      you wanted a window to work

      both ways, that you

      wanted coffee to put you to sleep.

      Disregard the snowbanks in your mind.

      Remember that ice expands

      as it freezes—its memory doesn’t

      defer to urgency or to what

      we desire. Snow

      and legs keep moving through

      the world listlessly. So much

      for floorboards. So much for

      absence that I once admired

      or even desired as if

      the world was in my shirt pocket

      waiting to unfold

      and scatter into the space between

      the two of us. You suggested a shadow

      could be musical

      or that the neck of a giraffe mimics

      the way some trees

      stretch toward the sky,

      free of knots and free of

      the mark of history

      upon them. It’s easier to say

      the word quaint than to be that way.

      Was your attempt at sensibility

      a worthy one? I don’t know.

      I don’t know how to place the weight of a breath

      behind the eyes. Money is a strange sort of memory:

      remember the market with nothing for sale?

      Remember how we corresponded

      for a month straight with words

      corrupted from their meanings?

      An ashtray wasn’t anymore.

      Arbitration became so apparent

      that suddenly knowledge (even a thought)

      ceased to be incredible.