Rick SNYDER





Invocation

who can sit still
until the poems come
sniffing and small
molecules battered by
microwaves bouncing
off books preserving
letters like so many
little Lenins suspended
in the warp and weft
of white sheets creepy
to read they bend or
crack in your hands
which are like new
despite deep creases
and light speckling









Poem on My Head

I carry it everywhere
like a talisman
bringing no luck
but maybe a sense
of what I'm missing

*

Particulate city
swirls around itself
to tease new life
from a few tired
phrases

*

Such meager gods
epidemics of junk
and food fuse
into angry boys
pixel by pixel

*

The point of my
nachlass is to be
without one unless
it's utterly oblique
and endless








Poem for Isabelle

Early morning migraine,
the birds skronk among themselves—
I know their names as well
as they know mine though

they, at least, seem to sing songs
that are not wholly agonistic,
the assumption of positions,
the drive for survival in the bleak

and weedy fields of concrete
between three tenements, elegant
30s living in the heart of Los Angeles,
strewn and tagged like some Orphic

cyborg from here to the insertion
of your favorite celebrity's name,
if we insist on playing that game
and refuse to admit, in fact,

that we like everything we see,
from tacos to smog to reuters to qwerty,
even the convention of the first
person plural pronoun, borne

of equal parts spite and solitude
until some mother, I guess, yells
your name repeatedly among
the weeds, screens, and fields.








Evensong

Lovely umber poison
pricked with points of light
above the earth's aching
lateness, utterly indemnified.

Great slabs of silence
poured into perfect molds
and erected across the land-
scape, to make it thus.

Implacable white eyes
form streams of adult-onset
anonymity eddying into
pools of light, line by line.

Windows mirror windows
among faces remembered
names replaced in the flux
of bodies, coherent now.





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