four poems from Fair bodies of unseen prose,

 

Hanging a frailty on a flame.

An impulse, light enough. Drawn close. Must we break, divide? Childhood. The frequency of green, articulates. Articulations. Clock beside my bed, an apparatus. Thumb, to finger. Rhythm. Out of the word. Ambiguous, mezza. Preposition. Hillside, bespoke. Articulate. Thus, pronouned. Alpine, outlined. The signs, of course. To settle down, surface. To love, unblemished. This risk of falling. May not be enough.

 

 

How to regain the solitary mist which endorses inner rooms?

Repeated, structure. Decentred lungs. Among the folds of words, sense. Come to their senses. I descend some steps. I descend, from. What have you. Ancestors, declarative. Each tiny fibre, mechanized means. Atonal. Blood, a moving picture. Critical perception, walls. An ocean. Action. Shush your shushy mouth. The literal figurative. Index. Bathe, in serious light. Tactfully. To ask a question, to move like a statue. Start again.

 

 

, or a series of waves in air.

To be literal. Weight. The shape of this vowel. With one left eye. I connect one gesture. Blur. The very edge. Reluctant, compatible. To venture, a line. This green promise of spring. Disposition. A distance, untold. This space between projects. Illuminate. Voice is no help. How to eat fish, slice bread. A tomato. Precarious. You could not read the paper. And yet.

 

 

Thirst sung.

Fingertips. Some chords, scorched. Subdivided. Half snow, rain. To compose, in the light. We hold these curiosities. Shoulder. I am not parallel. Beams. In America, does. The narrows, of family. To drop this veil. The world is not logical. Wine moms, rejoice. A slight breeze on a rock. Minnesota, strong. Sing it. Shout it out. Whirls our vertigo, ferment. Whirls out forever. Must the language? Such ambition, hark. The morning, silver. What will come of it.

 

 

Fair bodies of unseen prose is an homage text for, around and after American poets Laynie Browne and Rosmarie Waldrop, furthering my exploration around and through the lyric sentence and prose poem. All poem titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken in order from the last line or phrase of each poem-in-sequence of Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2019), itself an homage text to Rosmarie Waldrop, with all of Browne’s titles taken from Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons Press, 1994). As my own sequence progresses, echoes of texts by both poets resound throughout, especially from Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens and Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Gap Gardening: selected poems (New Directions, 2016), as well as the collection Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole (Burning Deck, 2000).

In early 2023, I reviewed three recent titles by Laynie Browne, and quickly realized just how much affinity there was between her work and my own, an element of which is certainly due to our shared love of, and deep influence from, the work of Rosmarie Waldrop. Browne and I soon exchanged books, and In Garments Worn By Lindens prompted this response.