Chris GLOMSKI
Notes on Celestial Events
Restless waves
Roll out
To finding
As in a slouched doll of cloud
Direct the mind to blind-side
Parasitic moon
Whose lunacy
Finger-flicks
Remove
Well up from singed ticks
Black cheek
Black marker
This I-beam you’ve eaten
Carry its hovering water
Back across arcs
Abrasion
Leeching a nest’s heat
Ventricular
Burst of ice
The cuneiform feathers
Parted curtains
Oceanic
Gust in a maw
The ghost of a mauve
convulsed by swallows
Under the Broom
each has also its sweeping gesture
arrointing the witch
I remember thinking you flew midway
between the pointy hat and those saturnine
rings where sometimes your scalp
flashes Sometimes
indignant The sun
emerges vermicular, luminous
mulching the sky
Was the satyr right
is memory satirical or if it’s convenient
for you to play the pipes and
glide beneath trees does
your face form
communally swift with darkness
over the wild dark scribblings
on this paper
The Nineteenth Century
Masked by the wheels of umbrellas the private faces flash. A primitive
billboard’s conceptual flower it’s morning. Soda rinsed against the blind
metaphysic of rails good luck hanging a new sky
Too much not enough in advance. Pointillist implosions. Sunday afternoon
spent revolutionizing the swan boat of cannibal economies based on
pineapples and sugar
Japan Jena Jesuit Johannes. Maria Marten in the red barn at Polsted
Containing the whole Account of the horrid Murder. It happens the governor
was accustomed to walk at that hour. Tripped on my way to Soho and
thieves were all over me
More mysteriously, Franz Liszt. Paris barricades. Contemplating the
domestic atmosphere from the little house outside. The banker was
apparently suffering from dropsy, and resembled a Pre-Raphaelite
manuscript interred with a corpse. To be retrieved later by the poet’s friends
Fango è il mondo. Malaria insufficiently reported by press. Where do we
come from? Where are we going? To locate the source of the Nile. Every
morning and night, I’ve always been praying that I and my whole regiment
may soon be called to do it, and that we may do it absolutely well and proper
Away to Montevideo to the colonies of waterproof carpets maps tents the red
velvet of the tongues of fleas draining the marshes and cattails of furniture
ensembles devised for therapeutic purposes, galvanic columns of darkbodies the wings of electric labor forming oppressive glottals on whose river
memory flows like spittle rushed back by the wind’s empirical crash through
the hurricane of unacceptably profound stillness like lashes on the M of
Martinique
Attacks of kleptomania brought on by elevators and menswear. A salon
painting hung in a certain saloon. Receding in multiple eyes. Nebular thrill of
the arcades
Afternoons alone in the salon studying paintings of a certain saloon. Earlier I
had witnessed a skater stoop to sweep a woman’s glove without stopping.
Several nights now dreaming of roly-polying in its creases. Would go to see
that doctor but have already forgotten his name
Cattle from the western states go east by rail. Grant enduring his two
terms. “Us” is not “them,” though in general both we and they build a
bridge. 1899: a new crane swings over the marsh in our sky
An Idea
Is a phantom A quantity
of minutes following
a checked bid to
place the afternoon here To be
continued or carried
in one’s pocket If the
idea is to win something
big or as definite
as the line
between then and
now without betting
away your
horizons To be even Or as
unfinished as mythical as
shipwrecks punctuated
by the cool depths of
their interiors To be
ridden out On
the axle of the phrasal
the dream of the scoured
parking lot turns
on a genuine anguish
for the missing car Pointed
toward some indefinite
quality The fulcrum of
‘An Idea’ Which is
a poem begun yesterday Meant
to finish this afternoon Eidolon
of other time Away where
we may drive
that car
It's Not What You Think It Is
There is a place for it Even if
only tagging along It will
emerge to render its prefaces
transparent It’s in possession
of the kingdom Breaking
into blossom it will build
its threshold on sight Now
it’s listening and
marked by a kind
of velvet eruption The
cling of it is meant
to ward off evil Yet evil
flourishes around it It snows
in some tulips to inhabit
what no one hears There
was a time when it
was carried by freshets
on the Little Miami
which isn’t where you’d think
it is Mere geography’s
not it Sometimes it
confuses the cursor with an I
that stands
around blinking as if
at some remove
from things that falter That’s
not it nor is it helped
to more than a blindfold
a personification Once it
is down to a single string there
really is no sort of question you
can put to it It seeks its
own kind Crying like a dog It’s
10 o’clock at night It is a dog It’s not
mine It lives two doors
away Tomorrow it may
change its tune the way it does
when another dog walks
by A female dog is not
a doe A deer is not
blue True or false It’s a trick
question Read it for what
it’s worth There are many deer
outside Reading, Pennsylvania beneath
the pines at dusk As if outside reading
its first intensity flared Then faltered
in an aura of absence Or so it
is written
The Vicinities
No way to answer their
buildings We live They emerge
darkly Shining in
physical conversation Partial to entry-
ways or numbers on
transoms Beside these are trees or
water that heaves in weather
never admitting to much Through
their eyes the others not quite
looking back
should be us
Readymade
I brought conceptual ants to the picnic. That’s the trouble. The improbability of a certain unresponsive hand. Chances are your song is playing in someone else’s head. If you come into the linen like a star; if you are given to swimming the wreaths of the sea. If the chancellor resigns. If we pass a certain sign again on our way to the country.