Rob Schlegel
from American Bloom

Medium-sized American eyes
Medium-sized American attention
I am an American television

pipe-bomb, medium-sized American
fear, I am an American television
commercial, I exhibit unusual,

I am an American unusual
behavior, I exhibit an overture,
local, to what, to use and useful

•

Limits of language, limits of mind

National, the sound of apples growing

Yellow salsify, opening and closing

•

Medium-sized American diamond
Medium-sized American pear

I am an American conflict of interest

Medium-sized American translation

I am an American sigh, a limit
of language, a limit of privilege

In this excess, a thousand exits
though none named Rosenbaum

who was wont to say, I want folksingers
not just singers of folk songs

•

From the chimney, I am smoke
blown sideways

Saint Ice Saint Anthony
Saint Destruction, find for me

a water deep enough to drown
these straws of indifference

•

Around those whose agendas are national
I need to know what national is

Its use seems limited to the human-condition
but its condition seems fueled by privilege

•

Providing a continent with names, historical,
formal or otherwise, gives it boundaries

The size of the country overwhelms me

In each moment, a new consciousness

I want again
the feeling of being engaged in the world

Into language I am putting back my body

 

 

from Wrack Line

Habit of standing in the what-nots
and all that

You know
sore heels in the shallows

No time for the mouth
its teeth flossed with smoke

This bird, there is a lake
to drown it and snow where highways
cut the hills in half, green and blue
glass-floats touch and drift

Wrack of grass and twigs

a sympathy of dirt or what it buries
our hours and how we spend them

• •

Clouds fold over ebbing in the inlet

Merge of water with water, one wave’s
dissonance from another’s bright surge

Have I moved so little in my watching
I collect more than water
in the span of my nets beneath
the glass-clouds of morning, there is morning
in the still of the weathered stones
dappled with rain, breaking

I am haunted as the wrack the waves
leave behind

Residuum of a life I have seen
the beginning of a meadow I have not

• •

With every wave Adrian, I grow attentive
to sound your body out

One part pinion, one part mouth
from which I hang your death-mask
on a branch in the linden

Birds flit in and out of your eyes and
this is the sound I remember you by