Erratic Facts
Page 3
many of the earmarks
of the actual. This
must have happened
many times before,
we must suppose.
Almost a pulse
if we could speed
it up: the repeated
seeking of our several
senses toward each
other, fibers trying to
reach across the gap
as fast as possible,
following a blast.
STILL START
As if engine
parts could be
wrenched out
at random and
the car would
still start and
sound even,
hearts can go
with chambers
broken open.
EGGS
We turn out
as tippy as
eggs. Legs
are an illusion.
We are held
as in a carton
if someone
loves us.
It’s a pity
only loss
proves this.
PINHOLE
We say
pinhole.
A pin hole
of light. We
can’t imagine
how bright
more of it
could be,
the way
this much
defeats night.
It almost
isn’t fair,
whoever
poked this,
with such
a small act
to vanquish
blackness.
IN CASE OF COMPLETE REVERSAL
Born into each seed
could be a small
anti-seed useful
in case of some
complete reversal:
a tiny but powerful
kit for adapting it
to the unimaginable.
If we could crack
the fineness of the shell
maybe we’d see
the bundled minuses
stacked as in a safe
and marked in ways
that, after the crash,
would spell: big bills.
STRUCK TREE
You could start
to think a struck
tree’s new leaves
from up in the
good part would
turn out halves,
but you have to
laugh at yourself:
loss doesn’t get
into the subsets
of absolutely
everything.
ERRATIC FACTS
[It] was a very bizarre, erratic fact.
—W. G. Sebald
Like rocks
that just stop,
melted out
of glaciers.
Often rounded
off—egglike
sometimes
from erasure.
As though
eggs could
really be
made backwards,
smoothed from
something
stranded
and angular.
And let’s think
it’s still early
in the work,
and later
the eggs
will quicken
to the center.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which many of these poems first appeared: Agenda (UK); The Believer; Cordite (Australia); Dark Horse (UK); Granta; The New Yorker; The North (UK); Parnassus; Poetry; Poetry London (UK); Poets.org; The Smithsonian; Threepenny Review; Virginia Quarterly Review; Yale Review.