Maxwell Gontarek

Badlands again

A “biome of

hue”

In the basin

bone low

The sun wool

               bulletin

Loess

a belted

predicate in tow

I figure the wars of attrition though

began before they started

Somewhere you can’t put your finger on

Some woodpile in some between the legs place in the mind

History is a drain

with its pre and post swirling around it

So the event is a hole not a pile

Where does that put the present?

It’s how you put on the jacket

And why we fear the wooden people

They believed in that they were sure they were forsaken

               and so what they believed in reasserted itself some other way

               as anyone is sure to warn you things are inevitable

Their spoons rose up and drove them from their homes

For them it’s like vacation

On good days you leave your signature on such scenes by dint of your totally broken fingers

Wouldn’t it be possible to wait in the way?

To spoon in that drain?

Not even close

Closer

On good days words concretize their context

like loaves of strand

You’re near a kind of mirror

Melee wants to see you

Medley wants to see you

For a sure

We couldn’t make a bed by accident

Even better we’re made of maize

those days

And there’s everything wrong with waiting

Tomorrow it will be derecho and demeanor

who go somewhere where they can be alone

They too will try to buck causation by representing what it’s like to bear witness to it

Wasps in the algae watch

The secret of our century feeds on all this until area is bare

Then juncture is added and yet we

ululate “abandoned beauty”

until our tongues seem to define the air

instead of record it

We sound nuts

The would grain

Orange ounces of yet we

Rushes of folds

Toll a water

Mere total

               thought of

               “cherished melting things”

as a reattachment

to presumptions of infinity

Silence pushes against you the silent pushes

Apophasis fills the fridge until it leaks corn

We knew this would happen as in a mirror

Tired of planning an event that would mean us

               we read about one on its way

               “today they are swinging through the trees”

It’s briefer that way

A drain seiche a rapprochement

The water orange from the horses

Before the horses the face

orange from the water

The country in the orange

clear

During the war we mostly hid under each other

It’s not that things aren’t inevitable

It’s that they’re briefer than that

A melodic motion dispenses with the use togetherness implies

It circles where you are treen

where you have really lied in waiting

where you are appetite

We eye this shut until

“where’d you get them antlers?”

“They come with the house”