Errors in Continuity
Between things, I ponder
The linkage between things:
Fog up to the gorge brim,
The alignment of seasons,
The constellation of notes
One calls a variation,
A backward glance, boreal
Mosses and lichens in swathes.
How a ladder implies a story.
The released arrow’s whisper.
The errors in continuity
As time lapses or loops.
My interests are conflicted,
Out of sync, and fitful.
Memory flattens time,
Eases out the wrinkles.
Like you, I am tired of living
Already in a hypothetical future,
Of the snagged birdsong’s timbre,
Of mourning as a site of renewal.
The crow, again, a portent; the dream
Translated as always into words.
The linkage between things:
Fog up to the gorge brim,
The alignment of seasons,
The constellation of notes
One calls a variation,
A backward glance, boreal
Mosses and lichens in swathes.
How a ladder implies a story.
The released arrow’s whisper.
The errors in continuity
As time lapses or loops.
My interests are conflicted,
Out of sync, and fitful.
Memory flattens time,
Eases out the wrinkles.
Like you, I am tired of living
Already in a hypothetical future,
Of the snagged birdsong’s timbre,
Of mourning as a site of renewal.
The crow, again, a portent; the dream
Translated as always into words.
Snatches of Old Tunes
One hungers for the past, but memory’s simmer has not even reached the surface.
: :
When you speak, I hear in the headphones the hesitant, not quite fluent, voice of the translator.
: :
Leafless, the woods seem nearer, passable, but where does one enter amid the snow drifts?
: :
A school of fish. A thousand arrows. The rubbed-up static of a paradox.
: :
Magnificent, astringent, life rarely seems brief. In the dream my mother calls out, Who’s there?
: :
The crying child catches herself in the mirror and, delighted, cries more, performs crying.
: :
A sentence moves west to east. How to represent the vertical by way of the horizontal?
: :
A slurry of moonlight. A short rain to dilute the mood. Snatches of old tunes.
: :
One proceeds as if one might accumulate innocence rather than lose it.
: :
A house is too small for the spirits inhabiting it. The story slows as we go to close-up.
: :
In a room, you are depressed. In a landscape, at a respectful distance, you are melancholic.
: :
One is slightly ashamed of one’s prodigious modernity, of the newness of one’s new objectivity.
: :
Due the subsequent enlargement, it is difficult to say just what it is we are looking at.
: :
Lipstick on a coffee cup. A buried grain doll. The delayed obsolescence of a Geiger counter.
: :
When you speak, I hear in the headphones the hesitant, not quite fluent, voice of the translator.
: :
Leafless, the woods seem nearer, passable, but where does one enter amid the snow drifts?
: :
A school of fish. A thousand arrows. The rubbed-up static of a paradox.
: :
Magnificent, astringent, life rarely seems brief. In the dream my mother calls out, Who’s there?
: :
The crying child catches herself in the mirror and, delighted, cries more, performs crying.
: :
A sentence moves west to east. How to represent the vertical by way of the horizontal?
: :
A slurry of moonlight. A short rain to dilute the mood. Snatches of old tunes.
: :
One proceeds as if one might accumulate innocence rather than lose it.
: :
A house is too small for the spirits inhabiting it. The story slows as we go to close-up.
: :
In a room, you are depressed. In a landscape, at a respectful distance, you are melancholic.
: :
One is slightly ashamed of one’s prodigious modernity, of the newness of one’s new objectivity.
: :
Due the subsequent enlargement, it is difficult to say just what it is we are looking at.
: :
Lipstick on a coffee cup. A buried grain doll. The delayed obsolescence of a Geiger counter.
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Eric Pankey is the author of many collections of poetry, most recently The History of the Siege.
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