Clark Coolidge

I look in that one kind of dwindled. And in this,
look up, a truncheon in my fist, tin pot
on my head, the war. My father, I’m looking at, is my
age then and thin, his pants streak to the ground,
shadows of rosevines . . . His father sits beneath
a cat. Here the shadow has more flavor than my
trains, elbows on livingroom floor, bangs that
curl, opera broadcast, The Surreptitious Adventures of

In edges, in barriers the tonal light of t
the one thing removed overemphasizes tonally
and you could hurry it, and it vanish and plan

You go out on an avenue, but may be taken in despite
your chordal list of hates, overcomings banished ready
receiving you from a darkened cone, the one a beat
behind the one you there are

Then the I not part of the you equation, but the

When you get in on a try you never learn it back
umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world
in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail
bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without
travail of the tale, the one you longing live
and singing burn

It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out
or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet
as if to say nothing moves me. Then
there is the chair. And one speaks of
the chair sitting at the table.
Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth.
The object is a piece of thing before. One
shifts in a chair and opens the talk.
And the time it says nothing one moves.

But it could not be brought to see what it
could be brought. And the leaves are
away again, teamed. A parent at the
last and a parent in the middle. And
as stones I thought it right.

Two plates, and on the other side all the
forest pieces. The clock says stay.
The books lower the earth, and in gardens

the rooms are chosen, then they move on
the beads are wetted in the lime
the weedlot boils in the blood of one eye
the children first are cankered then they spin


there are not routes, only dials
the rocks are spun together in one ball
the laundry is of rust, the pillow shrieks
pianos all blow northward and return

He crackles the air in big fist
because it is turning, the night’s spine
and the fast floor of last year is now the wall of this

Those cracks should be flowers but there is no light
nor lights in the windless binnacle strewn
a slow rate of thought in the broad attention

What is shorn to say and then to leave
awake in the sleep, the pen without its cap