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