Poetry: Jane Lewty

Whosees

Jane Lewty

 
1.

The eye is a long steady-state/ threatening eye

Untutored
unable to blink

If it could
then the house is a door
     is a port, a mere slit
warp thread
porta fenestella

with a spindly god to show the way

2.

Seeming error soulmost error
And the error is logic
that seemed so right and will be right when the house
               is not a collection of sorts

new formica / drawer liners/the one chair — leather
its tiny catch at the skin

and the seeming immobile hang
a kind of evening delay
shadows aft-edging on a smooth
flat of wall

agreements left and the watching for them

3.

That the house is a door, is a shade.
Is a non-contract
opening
and should never open to show
       as that would be what happened

4.

In the accident/a slack hollow
a mind let go to dumb working-
jaw kind of silence

lost away into graven awful peace lost
life
deep into anechoic deep/backdrifting inner sound
          someone

condensed by quietude
static and foundered

5.

Tree house
skin-stretched dun road house

Rapier road with a house breathing

Propeller fan box fan

6.

A swerve
a blurred out slow phase
the end of this/the end of that/haphazard
           difficult to tell which

on the intersection crossed like a smile bite

wheels like blood raying in full swing
An updraft of dense ions

And red from a receding thing is redder in color than when approaching
Running leaves the approaching the
Doppler effect a lackslip of thought
for a second

Sidelobe sound of night animals

7.

In a house once
routed from downtown on rollers
          over timber
the mural shot with capillaries
faulting out to each end corner

Message artifact house

made and spaced in real bodies
those who take the days known only to them

8.

Behind a shutter lid
time so wasted, way back

Time of watching cars

their surge, their suck

and a mini-storm
its water left in pans for the lawn
for the yard scalding

9.

A story house
an every scale house

Every hot fold
a roseboard aroma
unvocalized
the pale and flat bodies pass tight and tired as ever
          up to see a trap
in the attic and down

like floor-to-beam leaves at a kitchen window
desert plain to extramusical sky

10.

Buick skitched on gravel at 5.am
awake in scratchy blue fraying a blanket
the last few hours tapping at things. Dream: a man cut and culled from whale fat
or softening wood. And how old children wrote names there
over and again how the house is—

a madeover monster world in the heat that circles and mounts

a spasm of accident bad accident
sprawl and stupor
mapless

is a wait for aspartame tea
is dawn,
is a limber flick of leaves
the gradual dazzle of ceiling

11.

A skin scratching

when the light is blue and picked away
by remedies for boredom

How to swell in the heat that circles/ how to fill the space like a monster
tapping out what happened but
               too late
for the world shuddering back
through a trellis of the not-heard

the initials on the stairs from the children from the fire
              the hurried swoop down
through a softening door
soft back then
and now
a little lens
a nothing the revision
by a dark adapted eye
hateful lidded eye

12.

And what to do is to
think the house down as far as

the trapshell to grow in

fronded and sick
a vestibule
in which to prepare

13.

For
today out of three weeks
     has been very mundane

14.

Slicing up the formless /quietly slicing thighs
aching misordered
the rising from
a lying and sweating in doubt
             the fret
             the patrol

while styrofoam boxes curdle and film
          and in the head
there is slow burn and floodtide
a clagged banded world
told in scenes that spill before morning:

lips of whales cut back
a dead barge moved from one space to another

15.

And in the eye is a net
Dry-pieced and wide
as a house, sparing
in all the wrong way

its purpose laid out
clear a poor secret
such an accident

in water-burn
in the angle of
fore-and-back
in the surge the suck between
leaf patterns in the mute gleam of a window
where sleep
is inside
and where the blue sills hang

 

Poetry_Headshot_Lewty

 
 
Jane Lewty is the author of “Bravura Cool” (1913 Press: 2013).

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