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H IS THE LETTER OF THE DOOR

No way rises like rags wrung on a porous street
The weather in space is reap
A field afield island like in insular ardor
I mean we’re that porous street
We’re history
The shape of capacity where discretion doesn’t exist
Direction curls
H would break out a dish at the first sign of precipitation and announce

that we were not alone in our bodies

Cirrus are you asking if history has a subconscious?
Clouds and some other wild animals share a curl
It was raining
It was discounting
Liberation shied like a horse in each of its fallow shadows and hid haunches
The victims are anonymous as moss yes
But their anonymity renders the atmosphere legible
It’s their insurgency
At 9 I
My face is impossible
In the ragged corners of streets the imminent ring ebbs patiently
A contemptuous porcelain yawn reserves its rain
A dream is a patience

/

a version of Popa
 

aura guttural      gavel April

along fertile           pavements

dust collects               the spiraled objects

A dream came to me

I would get on a horse and throw dust in my eyes

and the horse would go to your door

Imagine if we put everything we wrote into practice
The weather would be out
The ledger sky and all the sheet thirties
Thereafterfeather
Abruption would pass into intermittence
Abseiling into abeyance
We would mistake this room for our perception of what it makes


/

a version of Popa

H had to be told to die                they say the ants ate her

or she dreamt that                           it would get dark

and it got dark      since she filled the house with ants

their lost heads         said her heavenly reticulations

with their human fingerprints


No way reses like rain rags on a porous street
Went to see street
Then the horse at court
After lunch again with the horse
Back home I wrote H
Went up the hill
Between “I dreamt” and “a dream came to me” a mysterious table like a door
Adorno dreamt of a restaurant that served Yugoslav food
Its ebbing white tablecloths
Without a single customer
H said it would be ridiculous to eat all because of an air raid
They came to a manhole
H said it would be much safer there than in the restaurant
Always a marvel
Aloe gravel
Even the value of a pin
Without hands and without law
A lace end
H says some islands over their highest point have a table on top
 

/

a version of Popa
 

the ways are on fire      we cut along their zero

so that we too                   can stand up

have you grown so much     playing on my embers?

cut across the zero                  let’s rip our hands too

are you ready to soar     to the source of my ardor?

Rain rings from the rags like bells on a porous res
I headed safely down the veined street that I know
All without news
I anchored toward things like that and I was passed
After having

the eaten

The bowls of that

people

H says that the rains must do this
 

/

a version of Popa
 

do you still keep my ardor?    you left us stale cake

ash cake                 did you surge

on the letter of my door?           our hands ate your cake

as we broke them

 


It was getting dark is like the bowls of people mossing
H says if there’s warmth it ebbs from things in spite
Ardor isn’t the only infinitely halved thing in us
Snowing is just light zero enacts
The objective of devastation is the opposite of vastness
The identity of polarity depends on the scorn of a rag

for anything that stands in the way of its suggestiveness

It’s true that any point on the rag can be superimposed on any other
It’s also true
Rains ants
After I turned the street there was a heroic exit wound
The corners live
Nothing by halves
They are the ragged ones

that scream the clarity of confrontation
when the street is haggard with ash and cake

They ring in pairs
Minute ants enter them sweetly sleepily barely willing

and fall cordite high from the hour

But you should not be ashamed of dying
It turns out to be a dish of nutritious snow
A cirrus uncurled from us the color of money
We came to surfaces and we drank them
We were trying to be transparent
H says my bed is made
Here is its ring finger
Sit on it

Maxwell Gontarek has poems out or forthcoming in La Lancha, Coma, Lana Turner, Volt, Tagvverk, Noir Sauna, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.

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