Read an Excerpt
Rank
Poems
By Aaron McCollough University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 Aaron McCollough
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-390-9
CHAPTER 1
I CAN embrace life
chestnut tangles outside
and inside two coffee cups
on our glass table
embrace
yet in these meditations
often desire
the retaining wall's shadow
clockwise in one burial
warren, shielding each other,
retaining the shadow's
long frame leaning out
history owns this much
framed papyri lined up like little counties
the remnant less than nothing
my fabrics and yours, touching
* * *
I GUESS an iceflow came through
to take the road.
I can only guess that would
destroy these remains slowly,
grass leaves twig thread drain
in the cauldron sewer called foothill,
in the foothill. Attendance,
a pledge is empty; not
your creature,
however tight the passage. No
the land is sifting off slow
with withered plants and silk, good rank
seeping always down and on,
ungraspable, plying stronger
agent to believe in, revise
my faith in unbelief, weak,
rank, ancient, I guess and guess
even pinched I would, with wind
in grass, not belong to any moment
nor believe in.
Only units with no faith, no interest,
poetry.
More rushing between the cracks,
winter cracking the foundation.
The old stump coming apart
in big chunks and round katabasis;
a spiral stairwell shimmies
under any weight,
absolute as sand.
A tree falls in the world's witness,
fungal sum and cephalanthous
triumphs in hearing, we depend
with the spider in the window,
the sun's endless tunnel, our shell,
a haze on the frontier,
outline of the flame and all
its inner varieties.
Feather and split. The woods sing out
to welcome the coming judgment,
a wood may go on forever.
What's blue's title? I'm alive as fuse.
What's lit by ash and unlit?
All invisible eccentricities
in an arrow in the snow,
spring's terrible words, paths,
lightning hideaways, inflamed ways in
and sticks scattered rather than bound.
A closed fist galaxy.
The center of a wagon wheel, a hole.
I live here.
The limits still sluice moss.
A ticking complaint rises
to the only noise in the yard.
Stand in the noise, your radial arms
pulled lazy with the moment's
octopodal weight, with the sea's
receding influence.
Noise is metaphysical.
By whatever induction we mark it,
this one note indicates a din.
Lichen covered slivers of limestone
bowing in the middle with some full gaps:
the world is coming,
not the world, what's coming is
earth, clay expelling water
after ice expelling clay, over years,
or, a world; one accessed
above another.
THE NAKED bones, especially the head,
a small, fettering memento
a year with two seasons moves
only as quickly as a year
as sure as its moments measure
safe as skin
a certainty unfolds to be certain
and shimmers in the silver rayed guitar
a way to move towards morning
should you seek me, you may find a flower
* * *
the power not put out chugs on in the dark
as light breaking on a slope shelf
schools of minnows angle away from us
anemone. daughter of wind, wind flower
* * *
I could kill for the songs, I could,
common little self, winking rain
clapping with the crowd alone in my room
as concentration pools in the flower
With proper care this may last
where the round guitar begins
against the fourth wall, a wheeling gray
with pixeled edges artificial flower
* * *
Where the river makes a delta
shear shining and never the same
top of the fairground, the antenna top
twice as close as the flower
* * *
Sinister can be better, sister.
The urchin glacier conflict
land of abundant roses, soldiers
in the snow. Each flower encased in glass
Owing to a sacred infrastructure,
bone meat skin
wave ambidextrous other matters
out of gaps in shale shine fossil flowers
* * *
Someone's coughing in another room,
getting over it. Wall clouds guitar.
Wall clouds voices. Being in a body
in an apartment, not being in a flower
* * *
Flower being and apartment being
Feedback coming from the guitar
lying on the bed and my pulse coiling
in the soil in the bed outside
* * *
do you wonder what traps an esteemed man
a fountain wreath painted from a guitar
egg-shell-chipped shining from summer dew
this tessellation of knit flowers
* * *
to smear some giant crumb over the skin
"whatever light there is"
sunburst to soften paving tar
on which moss grows but no flower
* * *
a permanent (as earth, as shell, as skin)
record sustains the silent guitar
and its rushed out waves, rushing
on the sloping shelves galaxy
SEIZED THERE where the thesis is
clouded and clotted in the junipers
halfway down a tall slow wave
under too much responsibility.
One branch screwed on another
with roots punching from the stone wall
one long seam from the bright insides
must be bending.
Placed on a hill in a cuddle of bones
knit with soft effects between two seas
sodden hair clot here, swath of bark
wheeling beneath the trail.
I couldn't catch breath
(knit with tender appointments)
and stood to lose my place.
Respecting natural boundaries
lake lapped coasts of the ice peninsula
respectfully declining.
The kingdom was never more
than some inflated local
piece of the movement.
I caught breath.
Saw the strings before I heard them.
The bars, the topographic rings.
Lord of this puddle,
treat it well. Well-meaning harm,
your measure and rule.
CAN'T FEEL the sun
one face after
the certainty in the gate latching
with its sympathy or another face
in far enough properties behind
sore scores, a storm settled, wound up
to a gelid chime
great heaviness by the wall, the sneer
breaching underneath, escapes
in a keystone, stroke turning
on its shadow
the largest outposts
on the head of, the stroke of strict green
soft but sharp, if slow, if legible
alone as a sting at depth
urge hardening toward a season
pushes out passages to a front
hot with the insult
until a birthmark sets, settles, cracks
in the green dry wind
not unafraid
I LOOK into the black bird's black planet
for lake, some sustenance, for ice
a smokestack view with green conundrum
dredge in the black eye flower
* * *
A silhouetted tree of the morning
disordered sense desired damask
has languor never language, formed
in shadow against light in full shower
* * *
songbird-construed clouds resembling flowers
the hour upon us again
as small hands chime
pattern a hoof, helmet, papyrus
shred anything we know
* * *
Outside the capsule of the self but not
so far you're alone, guitar
Listen
to the fugue, a word for flower
* * *
My own dull animal shell
my own dull cell
strings slept together and woke
as Spring asserts
It keeps inside a box it makes a home
inside a case inside a mouth
They stay behind, belonging
where nothing rises
* * *
Inside the cloak is OK with withering
anticipated, dry guitar intoned
still numbers, and crumbling down
(the cloak included) goes the sunflower
* * *
Headlights swept the extremities sharply
self-semblance struck the string of the guitar
in puff & hum,
louder than roots
WAKING ESCAPES from a hole somewhere;
eye of one season beside another,
winter and spring of the same old face
turning, not unsurprised, at sun's hail
in the longer morning of this place
and the longer dusk, slow announcing
purlieus, cold sun horn in water.
In a sling as regards time, blindfold
in muslin, utterly swaddled,
cocooned not at a beginning, not
at an ending but in a middle
and a middle again
the damaged bird's sidewalk yawning
I open and close upon the day
and open and close
a sharp tree among the blurry ones
blue fir between blue pines
in my party are the bodies and places,
the feelings and movements,
the words for a total but more
than words or total in my rank,
unpruned,
unpruned
glare in my eyes,
some warmth still in the window,
the fan silent, a snow just begun
uniform
sleep is not the picture of death here
though one way to handle such pictures
NOT FLAWS. Signatures.
Impression in cellulose darker, lighter
a third season forgotten.
All the tassel tips grass, all shiver.
Cold hollow down this little
steeple, murky gathering more foam,
a secular brook detaches and
another so on, sound
along all the lines, spilled all the bends
until still or somewhere under hill.
Nothing inanimate that may be touched.
Nothing unremarked.
"The tree of life or trees," "rigor," "mercy."
You must accept your disappearance
by learning to disappear politely,
the shadow lean from great light
and frivolous impediment.
Still. Under hill.
Tree. Separation.
Long grasses in accord.
Long and short flaws — not flaws — circumstance,
deciduous scrabbles —
Something less
also lessoned, a new difficulty.
IN THIS many analogued book of animals
a twitching branch is right,
framed in skies added past measure
adduced with feeling's waves on the skin
as a two-step and rigid fluid
with the perfect pitch of the chorale
discernable to each, as a switch,
down to each voice, each minor death—
adolescent squirrel washed from a hole,
eyes bold past the manifold, just off,
out of colloidal unseen gutters.
That each station of my movement swells
with humus and repels it—
were a stump eroding in a shining bath,
were the high-heavens decay unsmelt—
is merely accurate, but as they are
thus, the swelling splits the abutment,
the thrum grows acute,
the glass breaks, leaks, and stains a shirt.
Sound in the service of music,
unwound but recoiling, the worm, the weed,
all raw bodies in the thicket,
densest in the middle, the present bog.
Even in the middlest mire,
a single and certain saving sin.
A heaven if not also another place,
a filthy nest, runs along on wheels,
gangs of legs, or pressed by the low wind.
That is a camera which must feed
but never rest and vegetal film,
a kingdom in case, in cases.
A sound, an image, a blow.
A sundered tether, tied intestinally
in knots that should not fit the given.
the buried wire erupts with the vine
and the strings choke the juniper
wind in the guitar, an acrid home signal
floating above the bulb
water in the pine bark and spoiled firmness
everywhere at plank ends swamp foam
radiating with the rains
ankle deep
entirely deep as to swallow whole
little movements
complaining or waving with the gesture
sweeping strings
I can see you in mud,
concocted, connected to
lines charged fungal in a mopey array
called the vault
all the animal songs by the river garden
hundred claw fingers single strings
stubbling progress to be mown by a
corner of the park invasive flowers
suburban remove, by a rain garden
sirens, diesel, exhaust, guitar
invasive, conclusive, mosquito
what? what flower?
call them movements, touches, even feels
call them vignettes for upright guitar,
a temple layered with only the sounds
material or petals
flower says the birds leaves path bench flower
invading each other as guitar
in tiny hairs of the canal
and the foot in the grass shaped flower
crow softens the bone in the puddle,
lumbers up a dark slide
and won't crow this way for fear of losing
marl for marrow for a high nest
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rank by Aaron McCollough. Copyright © 2015 Aaron McCollough. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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