THE LESSER SYSTEMS
On this day when
the clocks follow the concentric
tempo of a top
and the verb to be
has worn off its costume
so the tongue can pick a place
among pictures, touch
the unsung repose of shut
it’s like the spring is one
powder keg of pretty
and all the math that felt
unnatural adds up to up
So stay with me
and stir paint for definitions
give red to melancholy
for all I care
for all I am is care lost
in a cornfield where it seeks
accord, as love
is as much about a person
as the atmosphere they create
around your coordinates
the admissions parlor
the family tree where dinner is religion
No one ever asks
about figments of reality
but they’re there
confetti and metaphysics
make a fine pair, as do
lemon and ocean, progress, nocturne
plus other approximate
pronouns such as you and I
and the only chronological
constants worth a dance
the two-step we ones
call on and on
PRIVATE NILE
River fluent, sired
by ice in the up-high
waters, mineral
physic of the mind
which notices a poplar
culture here, where
the granite’s gouged
by endurance and tin trash
roosts in the rocks and clicks
in the wind like a let-go
radio. Landscape no
bandage, I pick the parts
I want to see. Others badger
me: fox-flash, lapis, a guess
down its hole, Peregrine
sixty miles an hour
into a kill from the clouds.
No choice in vision’s
twitch to catch the last
of the lark? rook? pigeon?
for the mind keeps a ghost
named grain or peril
in its protein chain,
whom the labs hack
and wish to fix with Latin,
while we less-contents
welcome another shepherd.
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Andrew Seguin is the author of Black Anecdote, a chapbook that was a winner of the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship. He is also a photographer with an abiding interest in 19th-century photographic processes. To see more of his work, visit www.andrewseguin.com
