poems
Mark DuCharme
Artist’s Statement
I art what I aspire to
Be
Don’t withhold yourself from the obvious
Reasoning suggests a breakdown
To be or (not)
To do
On the hymns or hems of gods’ delivery
Or another sort of winter
Estranged futures we’ll not live to save, or
Say, deep in the harp dictionary
Like lonesome survival footage
Too late, with cheesy forthrightness
What’s underwritten isn’t often sung
Think, in rash standings
The first time it explodes
Is always the best
What’s your favorite keyword?
The sun isn’t on your pillow
Yet, until tomorrow
Fake, like survival hindrances. Weren’t you alone
When I was burning
Past dawn, when all the gray men wouldn’t sing
But hoped
For thin, imperfect mileage
Meting out the slain
Of cold, incited buildings
When great dining was through
Don’t forget the paper harbingers
& Their place in industry
O happy dawn
O new perspectives
O jutted relapse
What hills there are that bring you
So much pain
Noon
Some guy just yelled
An iridescent pause
To make the sun clean
A clockwork pinnacle
While the sung’s
Explosive, anytime
Whenever bleating air’s
Away with windows
Damaged
Alone, or partially destroyed
With Boris & Natasha at a
Pillar’s unique plastic outlook
As shredded as the sun would drown
With the same sort of neon
Active if only left alone
Don’t shoot the devil’s eyebrows
Placable with all grace askew
Like some sort of cetacean
Crisis lobby
Tourniquet punk dentistry
Spilled like devils’ windows
Inflected with ICEmen
While neon
Bursts & noon won’t heal
Caught Gaze
Failing light in the trees
Gunner struggles to be kind
A rare trombone fake the place chambers
Vestibule tongues hazy retreats
Making things with our eyes that birds fail to notice
The stars in the yard
Ineffable jade furnaces
Blank ideals listless raconteurs counting houses
To go before the junk twisted gritty alarm
Angled clumps of wide gaze
Mutant tinctures brass standings
Clod ankles hurriedly on
Loaded marquees
Precipitous shock valves
A fatal mirage
Fool, Can You Outrun the Wind?
Listen to the children who shriek in cathedrals
Who spew laughter from the pulse of a dying old woman
Who quake in morning without bones or shadow
Who wear the garments of uprooted sunflowers
Who balance on windowsills of dead summer eyes
Who make the clockface cry & wither
Who make the ocean a bed full of wounds
Who carry juniper torches in the blaze of the day
Who are anthracite or quartz formations bodily
Who wear shreds of honorable meat
Who chase sparrows in heaven
Who lavish dead singers with relics & balm
Who bear the root of silence with silence
Who shake in dulcet peace
Whose eyes are the eyes of flowers cleanly knowing
Whose voices are chalk runes
Will you know them, in tattered cities
Down the map from extraction
While the moon encompasses horizon in the sky’s lucent future
While the wind overpowers your voice in a dream?
Order
“and the iron shelters for the border guards bound by the strands of rain”
—Jack Collom & Lyn Hejinian
What songs do the dead wear?
Bundle them up inside your hair
When winter approaches, & keep still
While flocks of starlings clutch at your fingers
In pert, moot shadows. Order implies
Frustration, but that doesn’t mean
Bewinged speech harbors the living. Take time to play
In the tomfoolery of exquisite nightsong. The trough is rough
& Wooly. Oceans sink near it. “Huzzah,” you say, &
“Where I go, the bellflower stirs restlessly.” Meanwhile, the cries
Of migrants drown
In voices of unreason
That low & cackle like jackals in the obscene farce of public silence.
At the meridian,
All is peace. A light snow falls on the imagination. Am I caged,
A tragic hero
In a low-rent melodrama? The able, amber settlers all want
More,
Gruff with seaward lilting, while respondents get nixed &
Look for a vintner
Worth a fortune in bus tokens. Bright azure stillness
Follows, once upon a disaster,
Adjacent to noonday speech—
A living wager
For the slain.
Typographies of Shadow
i.
Sayonara, Mister
Take up preemptive eavesdropping, or fall
The length of seven buildings, sideways
Then see what you can’t systematize. Me, I’m wary
Of a circus catching fire in my livingroom
& Its assorted, comic laughter
Dressed for cloudy days, in this economy
Slumming down waterspouts amid dire apologist-
Uncles with clout ribbon
Or newly read ankle thermometers
Down at the abattoir at midnight
ii.
Do you know how to fasten your bootstraps to standstills?
Show me a man with a word balloon
Dangling from his lips,
& I’ll show you sunrise
At the end of the line
Children made out of snow, but stepping through windmills
In combined, orgiastic silence
Mining silver in the pulse of an eye
Building mountains
Out of straw
iii.
O bluest space
O tiny convergence
O monotony money— o mad machine laughter
With no reply but mojo
No sheaf of graced monodies
No torque
No filament of bone
No soggy remnant
Of dream-&-breath-against-time’s
Blue remainders
Idle jabber
Clods’ vanished memes
iv.
You who, living not in tune
Are form, searing heaven
You, radiant moon delay
In case of narration, invent
A structure all your own. Abandon heaven
In redshifts of practical mortality.
No one sings, & no one wanders
At shadow typographies of limp abnegation,
Fossils of sea anemones murdered in your yard,
Gnawed silence, disappeared breath
v.
A glimpse of vanished now (that means snow)
Juts forward
In serene, inutile boat logic
An antidote to summer
You won’t concede
On the hair of a pillow
While winter slips
Away in struts
Of dead men’s prose—
Faint summer effigies
Tremblant offers & forgotten movies
Erased, would I glimmer
At the end of the wind?
Artaud had duende
Vallejo had duende
You have less than air
In the growing moment of wanting to be
A visionary light or cure