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Dale Smith co-edits Skanky Possum from Austin, Texas.
from Notes, No Answers
Should I assist or
desist, resist
or insist,
persist or exist
in status
quo stasis?
§
What we have
anymore is it
common or
comedic, de-
motic or
devalued?
§
Will we fail each other
if I want too much, or
find such hope in
faithless needs?
§
Don’t you want a bite
of the pie or at least feel
important too?
§
Is there love
between us, or
wet grass, maybe
car exhaust,
a political opinion or
a scene transacted
at the curb
through a window?
§
If you have to ask
whose history think
of ants burning
under magnified
glass and ask
again—whose?
§
Is knowing believing
the unknown’s reach?
§
Not the night sky,
not the moon, and no,
not the stars either, or
the sun after a shower,
not the slick streets,
day or night, knowing
we are plain and
numbered—that’s not to say
there weren’t flowers in her
hair, on his shirt, with their
dinner on a table next
to wine and a bread
basket below the abstract
paintings for sale—now—
how much were they?
§
Did I fuck up
something you
said?
§
Will I forget this
in the morning, or
in a moment as words
take what I thought
I thought and turn them
back on me?
§
If I persist on the course
I’m on will I find faith
worth the effort?
§
Is history a myth
or a name,
a corpse or a sign
for something we
forgot so the past
will keep living
inside us?
§
If I sing the song
of myself in American
will there ever be
any other
to live free
of who we are or
where we’re from?
§
If it’s so good to meet me
why’s your cell phone ringing
your desktop open
your words loaded?
§
Is the name an instrument
of teaching and separating
birds from trees, or pebbles
from grains of sand?
§
Are you happy
with what you’ve got
yourself into, or
are you like me
looking at this stuff
to fathom
what’s next?
§
When you think of
fidelity to love, what
bodies inform
your decision?
§
Wherefore the wind
that carries seed out
to extremes of soil,
and birds or bees
pollinating, or like
young lovers nude
in the flesh of
the other?
§
What questions and what answers
without taking so many words
away, to disperse them in romantic
silence, or metaphysical combat?
§
Was it the wind
or a word, a certain way
she tossed back her hair,
the late hour with our friends,
the wine, the black table mats,
washing the dishes or brushing
my teeth in the dark while
our son slept, the turn
of her profile in shadow
in the hall in pajamas
and outside new fall
leaves scratched concrete,
the traffic dull moving by and
loud trucks grinding me wide
awake to think alone while
they were sleeping?
§
Who will recognize this
when no one’s here
to explain it?
§
Who will know us like
we did, or turn our bodies
gently to enter
the softest regions we guarded
to look after our
places, close as we could come
to loving, our locus, shared
or alone?
§
Should death make
a difference to what
life gave for
taking?
§
Would someone please
put the moon out
of its misery and
rabbits out of theirs, and
while you’re at it could you
tell the birds we aren’t
listening ’cause something
beautiful that doesn’t
really matter
took charge
in the last ice age
in a cave where
Plato got it down?