The Poetry Project

Four Poems

Marc Solomon

Unwell Woods

These woods fear and forget
A season closing around
Shadow trying words near
Growth for derelict limbs
Last season’s leaves dirt

Dry trees crumble together
Broken exposed unhurried
In decline and linger among
Terms for low places idiomatic
Of not knowing how to stand

Feet wrinkle rhythm’s root as
Unclear passage loses
Direction false to its breath
Of wind grey and devious
Above the driven Hudson

Until sleeping root of tree rot
Knots the strand of threaded
Timber all sway and lurch
Twist bend and spread to lean
In twig-split gasps of intricacy

Your Lodi River, 1934

After losing appetite and sleep
This cause resists its moment
When peopled pavement touches
Tar- Rothko perfect, a fact
To grieve, corner of Milford and
Clinton, a distance from Passaic
For a small town girl, barely
Grown, bound to marry a boy
Helping remove you from your
Mother’s place and who feels her
River turn colorless with
Factories closing around
Her neck of the Depression

Two Would Winter Word

a word
no
a word about
not that
the word without
a window
winds
within the
not really
tracks of snow
left overnight
for trail makers
to stamp into huddles
negative and not
hunched
don’t
shadows listening
urgent and abandoned
never
unwooded would
word

Turning Turning Away

Stall repeat try again
No difference
Where to begin this time
No counting
On what never shows
By measureless profile
The faceless face of all faces
A hiccup in time
Unbearable breath of earth
No help for words wasted
Memory unbidden, nor abiding, an
Obstacle and treasure, at once
A ruin showing through
Unencumbered partiality.

It was there
Nothing else was
No speaking without taking
Consequences to commiseration
Words words words
Things sinking to distraction
Age after age
Waking to ruminate on aversion
Self adverse to self
Selfless voice reciting
Crooked accounts of its own
Inconsequence

Work from Space XXX: Space, Eros and Colonial Entanglements with Daisy Atterbury and Naima Yael Tokunow

Elsewhere