poems for TB, one of them about Swans, 2025
Chris Sylvester
*
April 11, 2025 at 10:21PM—and after
Water
Sleep
To never be clever
No neighbors
but your own miniature ring
and a tremor in the bonds
means the terror of bankers does console
little blue bird makes a neat little hole
never more than that, than
Mighty
Mighty
despite the lichen there’s buds on our tree
even if something’s gone off with the grass
underneath, me
walking those courses bare headed
all about the park, less branches
and goes right up
makes it more lonely and therefore
somehow, certainly, frightening
Challenger
Protection
She says ‘I can’t’
‘If I do that I’ll topple’
‘I’ll topple’
It is two days before her birthday
there’s that foot of a small column
everyone’s talking about it
the interest of children, appearence and
habits and spawn points of creatures
seeing themselves on camera
where they were
various bug types
what are we doing
*
WILL I NEVER SEE
whatever’s
the tall grass
four-way stop and flowering tree
dancers
fade into t-falcon
summer smell token farm with
geese bedded, fresh tilled field either side
the car
sleep
water goes a deeper green at the far end
happy birthday Tobin
*
he doesn’t want his tooth to have any more
food
so it doesn’t
teeth don’t get to choose
*
Notably, the swans
And after them, set high upon the ridge
looking down on the lake where the swans
are, the town
So many of them and every day, the swans,
and really no other birds on the water
except for them, they are lonely there
There are always more
Still days they turn about the surface and
the surface reflects them from the bottom
(or they push their heads and long necks
down into it), reflects also the green hillsides
about the lake, running down to it, various
sky
Not a valley just a declivity or dip in the
earth, all grass and hillside with the lake set
there and the swans there on it and the
town again up on the ridge one side or
stretch of the bowl, the others being bare
but for a road running to and from the town l
around the rim and then turning off away
from the whole thing, flat if it weren’t for
that departure
Nothing about the town matters save that it
is situated there like that and that people
live there in it, nothing matters about the
people that live in the town other than their
long familiarity with the swans, the great
number of them down on the lake, their
shared understanding about them
That the swans could be expected to be
there, that the lake was calm and still more
often than it wasn’t, so that the swans could
be sat upon high-polish, undisturbed
The importance of the town is that the
town’s people consent, accept this, and
they do
Such that when a swan appears in the town,
in the middle of the one main road or on the
corner fronting the bank, they all ignore it
thoroughly and as though by acclaim or
popular agreement
On occasion one will enter someone’s home,
this is also permitted, the dog won’t even
bark
The situation
Until the lake turns over and the swans, the
town is gone
*
small and predatory bird
I see a black box
the men are smoking at their cars
at the doors of their cars
away from the cricket game
still further
one of them spies a snake and screams
What do I do
not wanting to be rude
Policing. Horror.
*
S
girder’s not itself
cows is
and mist—it’s capture
hardly an encounter
impatience (He’s Sorry)
*
a champaign tract inclosed by hills
by hills
early-abandoned recruit, stuck, ruby throated
unwarlike lawns
earwigs in the garden, how did they
get there etc.
dream of Andre as he was
place my seal upon it, him
there
and toothless
*
Brickyard to Byard
‘children’
‘dangerous curve’
Tree
City