Deborah Meadows

Deborah Meadows grew up in Buffalo, NY. After graduating from SUNY, Buffalo in Philosophy and English, she moved to California where she taught for many years. She is an Emerita faculty member at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, lives with her husband in Los Angeles’ Arts District/Little Tokyo, and has published over a dozen books of poetry, most recently Bumblebees (Roof, NYC) Neo-bedrooms (Shearsman), Lecture Notes, a duration poem in twelve parts (BlazeVOX [books]), and The Demotion of Pluto: Poems and Plays (BlazeVOX [books]). Her site includes links to recent readings at Segue (NYC) and Beyond Baroque (Venice, California): www.deborahmeadows.com

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LANGUAGE LESSONS ON OFFER

language lessons on offer:

conversational frontier discourse

situated responses

transplanted from proposed dam site,

saved by intentional, retrieved lumber

phrased into an imitation knowing,

could pass election board of governors

for vegetable frames and plots,

who will stand up for these trees?

one by one, singular lives lived

in earlier name for that city

slated for precarious birdlife,

doubt turned from charisma

unplotted fields, pre-section map, sort

of idyl of roaming, meander of cobbled

category to mother matter, type of

doubt behind flawed answer

*

form, those conscionable wheels, but

the crank is stuck, so override it now

time and again, you to me, me

to you, us to them, them to us.

how “to language” a geographic concern

petty with cliche? snoozed through raw

tentacle reach, entanglement sea

sense-you, sense-we

amazement, low on supplies

the amount of wind is of no concern,

outrigged beyond colonial fantasies

of abundance and ease, blue currents

learning in the smudge of charcoal

erasure, love a nudge of lost strata

can be read here, wind compatible

to bio scatter and sideways seed

*

with repetition: got to know

the materials; with practice: technique

sphere to cylinder proportion, not

a sand reckoner for miles

the still point of fence lines dug into

its justification, to change where

light fell, water rose, stylus dulled

how we say their colors are shot

habits into habitation; umi tea set,

with cloud tray as our stage

stand of pines, their mycelia;

rail magnates, their replica statuary

as a geography, things have holes

space surrounded by subject:

respiration, our carbon interplay

innocent of water rights

*

careful before calm, un-roiled surface

riverine backward flow, isomorphic

harangue, domestic strife

away and off color, seconds

ambition or what of it?

fish pleasure in delta water

not on writing or pause, lush

vegetation in containment areas

another canal language

getting there, peripheral to feather

where one can only visit damage,

too dangerous to last long;

how stranded astronauts float,

a symptom of our small place?

elsewhere, one can visit on a wilderness

permit, too pure to last long

*

at what point did we under-

emphasize alphabets as technology?

all say: we are here beneath your feet,

here at shoulder height, late star gazing

*

“In the thermocline, the middle layer of the ocean, temperature and density

change very quickly. This can have the effect of warping sound waves, sometimes

by 90 degrees. Sound waves can take squiggly, unpredictable paths through this

layer, bouncing back and forth and becoming caught up in sound channels that

carry them sideways for long distances.”

from “Technologies of Uncertainty in the Search for MH370” by Lindsay Bremner

*

poisoned by bright colors, we missed

rebellion in calypso lyric

should ping be scarce, or from monitored

sea life? keep one specimen, expunge …

could new definitions change

how earth is treated? toss out

the rest, enter fused glass, lyric smoke

limited to broken phrases, among

bifurcations tilted toward us?

following too close, brake lights

missing, deep shade, after human life,

maroon music, not singular consciousness

wake aggressors, not much glassine

between, couldn’t find another,

failed at wreck recovery, pre-fossil

pre-patched as well, damage

*

word for nature that does the trick.

Somehow Martians were proposed

peopled with brilliant sea drift

planted doubles, underwater gravity,

once the tech assumed was there …

prairies plowed by ideas, pride,

made for singles, who would want it?

left both book and screen alone:

what could go wrong wrong?

leveled by right thinking, by topsoil

involving itself politically, planetary

binocular description litters a page

sad infusion thoughts scare a quote

on a dust knoll, formerly paved

now dead topsoil, back away from

troubled skyline now near, now far

*

… could it be known beneath some

other door?

transplanted from proposed dam site,

saved by intentional, retrieved lumber

captive in amber, ancient pollen

filthy tail of power has slapped,

but vegetable frames and plots,

who will stand up for these trees?

slated for precarious birdlife,

the legislative floor, and meanness

of intent sloped upward

doubt turned from charisma

category to mother matter, type of

doubt behind flawed answer

time and again, you to me, me

to you, us to them, them to us.

tentacle reach, entanglement sea

sense-you, sense-we

outrigged beyond colonial fantasies

of abundance and ease, blue currents

can be read here, wind compatible

to bio scatter and sideways seed

sphere to cylinder proportion, not

a sand reckoner for miles

the end sent us home via extended

lines bisected in time.

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