Graham Foust’s recent collection is As In Every Deafness (Flood Editions, 2003).





Thirteen Colonies                               


Fruit thumps in the pointless
grass, has no hand in itself.

Pain’s a sort of orchard.

A summer flower plucked black’s

a kind of tool.


*


I move around my many-
cornered heart some.
Evidence, reason, domain
I might blink back.
Home’s a problem all
heavy with walls.


*


Gashed arch
of the last of
an orange, a frown
of old moon.


*


Evening’s quick
ships of leaf are now
a shambles, the sky
an upturned sea.   


*


Later, winter
busies, winter
buries, winter
bruises. 


*


A thimbleful of diesel. 
Believable slaves. 


*


If only I couldn’t
understand, I’d imagine
some sarcastic new Christ, say
something someone would say.


*

I first heard loss on a record
I no longer own. 


*


Like new stars
or planets, our things
move quickly from missing
to significant.  Loose hair
in my mouth, hands.


*


The way the days gray over is almost
a system.  Sing at me
that sworn-to pedestrian sound.


*


How really caught we are:  caught
not looking, caught wet
clicking, caught
small.


*


What ruptured
constituents keep
me from the real,
the acres on
the inside flags refuse.


*


Loose hair, again in
my mouth—what clerking. 
I want something to not
do with my hands.







the lake


tears

we should’ve been this—

I don’t hate you

broken gift


*


cue the dull

machinery—
deer

are licking at leaves, the lake







only the asymptotes


a sound somewhere

its airplane
somewhere else


*


songs aren’t music

songs have to do
with music


*


all together now

all
apart







like moving large objects around


You can’t
smoke in
bars now
in rich-
kid city—

a grim
dumb logic
like moving
large blah
blah-blah blah.

Close your
face.  Tongue
a star.
Knock on
water.  Try
to find
something in
the fire.







a single person passing through a doorway in the dark


I am slow
as quiet, all
of clean, clean hell away.

Pain is okay.  (It’s
the practical
that murders.)

Birdsongs now
in the fuck-
thicketed blackout—

atavistic,
adrift—blow
me through, down.