Apartment Poetry Quarterly

7A              7B              7C              7D              7E              7F

 

7F Robin McLachlen

 

from MANIPUR


But yet another, Hasan, who ( as if saying could capture, this dome laid-over and
fretted with golden fire, senses animate and reaching

out,

not reaching, sheen of I only,
electrical patterns firing through folded, my genital brain-only
( but waiting for you to get ( but there is no out )),

said

( as with Dawn crawling to the reflective glass of the sliding door and breath fogging surface,

ba ba ba,

the syllables mouthed and almost silent, muscle twisted, flexed
into meaning,

the receptive-only matrix of nerve, epidermis, cilia and lens all propelled into,
the hermetic of thought made breath, naked rhythm thereof, clothed in

ba ba ba,

but yet bringing to contact, for this only moment, into univocity ( knitting, then,
of thought and sense and at times so immediate, your skin almost dissolved into page, say;
but then, others still, the exquisite meat marionette that is this rendered naked ( in attention ) –
the impossible ( as if it were thought ) level of vanishing detail ( fractal ) –
alien to the basic looking-out, that I only ever is, not sight, nor sense, but coursing, I mean )

and the all-of-this crashing in ( too-much, really,
and the ogre-clumsiness of his intended movements,
footed pajamas slipping inexorably out of balance,
and the 7 month struggle just to stand with supporting hands against the cold glass of the door,
to articulate his desert breath as ), but as if, in syllable-stitching, could hold it all,

ba ba ba,

as body ( but so living into, into meaning, into meaning AS meaning only, instead, into
( voices fought for, dearly caught ))),

look out

((( but there is no ) as I have watched whitetails, the country-dark of exurban night,
and heads bent low to corn and flinching intermittently ( you’ve never been safe );
all heads bent but one, and always, moment after moment, a different one,
as if pervading fear animating the herd, making it unit, until
a movement in the trees, something against wind, alien smell, and ears
turn towards the limit of vision, the purple edge of, reach, root-like, out past the borders of this;
then ( a short, a percussive hiss and ) they dissolve into black )

echo-not-echo, lightning cracking the surface of sky and then thunder resolving ).