Poems and Texts

From “The Green Lion Eats Mars” by Karen Weiser and Marcella Durand

air + force

Even the magic of looking turns air into a volume
music that is perhaps a musculature
every reaction a mysterious note that hums
with a minimum of information, this documentation
is transmutation—car horns bleat a communiqué—
some kind of universal knowledge the magpie
spells out from a telephone pole in the desert;
our conversation snakes single file but for
the desire for one second of a life to be recorded
with an almost mystical precision,
not the abyss of the disjointed, but the fair hum
of phenomenal revelation in an order particular
to one person: the glinting reflections of traffic
or water cresting the river; the gully, the magpie
calls, is also a music desiring to be fixed
an orbital movement permanently adapting itself
to perception, its own living eyewitness

Watercolor by K.B. Jones

Karen Weiser

Karen Weiser is the author of To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and the soon to be released Or, The Ambiguities (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), a collection of long poems in correspondence with various books by Herman Melville.

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