Maxwell Gontarek has poems out or forthcoming in Lana Turner, VOLT, Noir Sauna, Works & Days, Tilted House, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His first chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.
UNDER THE POPLARS THE BLOOD POPLARS HAVE FALLEN ASLEEP
I dreamt Isabel entered the horizon
And I was dust
My comets in honey thought the body honey cries
The dream’s still there but the entrance isn’t
Isabel you can read texturally
as iris load
*
Sometimes the books are pulled from the ground like bolts
and converge simultaneously into hazard
At this point they become us
All existence is perfect
The end in fine
Refine
Infinite finance
The nude clouds in the avenue
The haves
Hail
*
I shivered for the sinister flatness of the momentous
There’s no dawn
Isabel told me
*
Iris loads the lake with its scent
It’s where the silicas wake up at the cloud ends
It’s where the ground nerve superimposes its stakes
on the routs of which we all are is a part
It’s what amasses as history under the heels of our heels
rigid and coruscant
we feel ourselves stiffening with
The passage in landscape
Who pays
*
The carnage in soil
and that that carnage disappoints
above below
with such height
*
For instants
sometimes I cry
is the prime grammar
of song
*
I is a bell
*
The horizon is a showy diaphragmatic eye
*
To sow something of a cry
To ex
True act
a cry
*
Isabel
to be the rays of a central fire
which animates the future
and has already weakened
to be something that is
that is
is as yet to be
Did a comet cry in the distance?
Was there a mouth and what color?
The footsteps of the bolts sound
as if they too had been surrendered from the unspaced
*
To day there is nothing contingent
The hair of everyone undissolving
We are informed the feathers of barnacles
are not the ones that made and unmade stars
Of course they will one day
But there is no season
But we are informed
It’s one day
It’s all affection
*
To inscribe a caesura in possibility
The carnage is constitutive
It makes and unmakes a public
Apparent curve brio
the conscious limb and plane echo
We saw it as barnacle scale
so bound up with color
as if it had been harm
We saw it as closure
*
Here
hide in my mouth
Comets
are elegies
*
Echo on
my exile
warm as debt
or in debt’s midnight
You will be heard by the body honey cries
There’s no dawn
*
An iris is a contemporaneity that is not contemporaneous with itself
*
Speaking of the lake did the fire fall silent?
Sweeping the soil did I forget the fossil?
The hair of everyone undissolves hazard
*
The carnage that inaugurates the sparse record of I
and an acuity of regard
annulated and ensiform
I mean it’s a flower but it’s also an eye
It’s textural
What would your name be?
Allegoresis
Its value
attenuating to a zero point
the more unique it becomes
*
The wet book I eat at the lake says peoples do not live on exception
As a person half your body is in a horizon
And someone is asking you a question
As if by tracing there can only be one response all of them
*
Barnacles are ankles
*
I dreamt has currency in a dense nodal point beyond these scenes of exchange
*
A tiny divorce deports each spring of silt from seasonhood
*
The gone do not precede but inhabit the page
Their songs do not belong to any name
Perfect inserts us
*
Affection is a comet charged to the bursting point with time
*
Ages ago
barnacles flew here
and their razed axes
gave way to constitution
in the momentous horizon
We are therefore a species of book
*
A version of Pizarnik
A look from the gutter can be a dream of entrance
Revolt consists in looking at an iris until the eyes are pulverized
*
Dust punctum
It draws you as in it draws your eyes outside the frame
It draws you as in it sketches your eyes outside the frame
Where are you?
*
Antumbra is where the shadow of where we are together stops Isabel
*
A version of Vallejo
Under the poplars the blood poplars have fallen asleep
The aria at midnight in the area of soil
Isabel suns flock fallen on the knolls
It’s the author and protagonist
It’s carved in orphanage
It shivers in the last martyrdoms of bolts
as its paschal eyes catch a chance herd of stars
It has always gone down the moment with its rumors
But to day there is no dawn
To the undulation field
To the bell
To the color of the iris undissolving into everything
and in it
a mouth
covering its pupils
tracing their pastoral bay
*
A bay is a bark
A bay is an in
let
A bay is bark
Affection is recessing
*
A version of Pizarnik
You leapt from you at dawn
You sang the tryst of being born
A sad tree
In the cell of time
sleep looks into its own eyes
and tendency brings the tenuous response
of the leaves
Beyond the prohibition of zone
you arrive at a mirror of specious transparency
When you open your mouth your mouth gags you
And you leave
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