Statement of Record
If nostalgia is primarily aesthetic, then it is also unstable, and if we get attached to beautiful images today, we might spurn them tomorrow. We might love the beautiful images because we can’t apprehend them, “the beautiful” always relocating itself, unrecognizable as the city outside, which is why we keep trying to rebuild the city in our minds.
two boys are throwing stones
into the river—their mother
is beating colored dresses
against a small rock—there is...
I have a hostage code, a panic button, motion detectors, sensors
The dryer has run all day, I can’t find my checkbook
The new light bulbs (so I am told) will last forever
“If only.” Said only if a mixed-media retrospect
is also being salvaged, the herringbone chevron
a swimmer inscribes on the mirroring lake.
Oil production shrinks, corporations only secure / cash flows in downstream oil. A downward spiral / The fat red balloon has burst / The pink scoop of strawberry ice cream has fallen / out of the cone and melted on boiling hot asphalt
peace is only ever an interbellum blink
a mere footnote in the battleground
especially in these parts, armies clash by night
no amorous remedy for that, master arnold
when refugee babies are washed ashore
or the indignity of a naked dead body dragged through mud
a desperate person in self-immolation
a tearing cow on her way...
you got yourself a new motorbike
although you didn’t need it.
you have no money.
no worries we’ll loan it to you.
what should you be for the rest of your life
if not our slave
promise we’ll help you if you can’t pay us back
and then if...
The story begins like this. No. It does not. There is no story. Or, they shoveled a load of speed and shuddered toward the coast. Saltpans. Sparse groupings of pine. Dust. A bar at the side of the road. A woman beneath a tattered palm of tarpaulin, cigarette and sunburnt fingers. Vegetables, assorted fruit in plastic buckets. Flies.
He sat with the body for almost ten...
And now we’re standing, and I noticed that even with great attention and inasmuch as I had turned to my reading with great attention, that is, took up every word, every phrase, with the greatest devotion, I could not stop unexpected images from arising in my head and changing into other new images, that is, the images...
Nimrod builds a higher tower
this incarnation.
Bigger. Better. Badder.
Crows bring trinkets.
Suits shake hands.
At the Roy Chalk building
in Georgetown a staircase
circles down and around
into the belly of the beast.
A belated witness
tells what they saw, what they didn’t—
see the verses all lined up
and shot, out back, one by one;
how they fell into the lake which
was there for claiming them.
And the dog...
Perhaps you are like the rabbit
outside the fence, trembling in place,
having just escaped the hound’s
frustrated advances. You blend
Statement of Record