2 Poems by Maxwell Gontarek
lattice after your advice
Hold a lack
Blue lupines light
Erects ici of witness
such heat and such whose
stake is precisely the world
Not a parade but a kind of fluency
So close to the sun it’s actually dark
As if what surrounds you can be seen from a describable location
the horizon line clearer than any mid
Summer j’
Even just a half day
of “in total”
The will escapes analogy
Granted I
“here
we say to ourselves
another”
Lacquer red
The stage of the colors in the first letter of the day
The fabric so thin in places it can see through you
Take it in simplicity
Take it in duplication
A slight cast in the east
As it often does “here
you have a”
what we stole in order to pretend
it constituted the substance of words
The form of the sentence “the fire
the house is on”
Give it an inch
As it were
since the hymn to the machine was well proclaimed
there would be a space to fill
with a different shape of value
These innumerable reconciliation events
with the birds
ness hence
did not
nant pray
an artery
one country
can hide another
The much too much on the verge of
back light “from
earth to hell sap trunk
to disperse to connect
the air once”
No center in the middle of the night
No what falls to disclose the form
No something to derive
No anti numbers ache
“who when asked what we have
in”
Appearance
itself becomes the passage of a border
You this very place too the branches
One day the Detroit
the strait
turns sun
iso vert
the violence only ends
an “integration of cadences”
The chances are the same for everyone
and how much time is saved
We should refer to each other all our lives
“It felt like Martine was being shot in front of me”
Meaning
“the scene is consumed rather than seen”
“The raw horizon grew black with birds”
Meaning is another word for holding
How far does a thing have to be to be radiant?
This acute day
the grace of the past signs by extension
of the question it answers
Real dehiscent
At the irrepressible hinge of movement
You can return the tear
the levied start
the libel of stars
A day like any other parts
a progress
on grounds of light
Our dead language is on the way
as in its appearance is light
as in it isn’t very heavy
the shadow of the river
the moon grows a prairie
of stones for
lattice after your advice
What looks through what looks to be its end
To take place is not by any means
It is beside yourself
It is telling that distance is invoked more often than this strange tissue
“it is in the shadow of the arrow”
The violence in the eye
of the fragment
equally frugal
noon in the rude
math
nuff
Only details are visible
Bare shoulders
Endence
“Querida
we have arrived”
“blue like the cat
and the Tozai line”
and longer on you
this sign slow oh
me a re
morse
Proximities hesitate the immutable fact
And later we would pretend to know
April for centuries
The temporary abandon to do as if we were not present
This rectitude of the waters
Fascinated by suite
Our only movement
In facsimile
Sea walled
graft
Tache
saccades
The ablative absolute
Cakes
Then sieges
A smaller wilderness of million mirrors
Memoir
Asia Minor
all manner
of “paying”
What kind of closeness must exist for you to write
“watch my words dry on my eight faced tongue
where nothing of you exists where nothing of me is apparent”
Be wrong about something in blue
The circumstances which disqualify what’s left of you
The first part of State
a couplet which originated in Ate
“There is actually no before experience”
“And the damned cannot say now”
Dream hoses from the channel imply terrible intervals
Dis
aster
as furniture
our Flint within
I call wall the system
A kind of negative manure
That cuts across linden
Lumpen pacifica pasta of
The back wall “is”
a wall of lime
Whose target is the accounting structure
for which it appears to be designed
Radio ease
A wreathed
transaction
In relation
to what would seem to come from furthest back
without having been given
Mist in the valley
Piston must
An a ready mirage
my raid
To the left of mail’s elm
The distance is the place
and I feel that physically
The opposites are beings at their pistil most
In Tristia
at the bottom of bring
your equator from
the black forest
to the black sea
a house of our own
looks over
a discrete
lieu
A horizon gently massages the gaps in the fringe
The future the silt the figurine
Told me what you could of there
“and” without
“this tangent”
our what “be
comes a thing
of weight”
In the earth where
you move
With its auguries
With its entrails
Which can only cut into a form folded into itself
A watermark in the air
Maxwell Gontarek has poems out or forthcoming in Coma, αntiphony, Lana Turner, Volt, Noir Sauna, Works & Days, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.