"Here the prize was
copper which melts but does not burn..."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
Vertigo
Shaft-mouth one is aware of that drawing, gut-clench in which presence
at the lip implies presence at a greater depth, therefore velocity
With its spectral shift, lush green of periwinkle and honeysuckle
running down to black against red clay, infinitesimal Doppler
modulation of the bees that descend
In search of one more sucrose extrusion. We see: iron bedstead, ragged
upholstery of a couch snagged where the first lateral tunnel
Recapitulated this dispensation in terms of earth and ore. Appliance
skeletons. Not a stable place, one picks one's way
Through briars and scrub elm with care as if a heavy tread could
dislodge some internal synchronicity, the way it did once at New
Straitsville, the miners free in that moment
To see their earth on fire; or at Centralia, the surface withdrawing like
the shoreline of a dead sea, pulling
More tightly in upon itself in smoking temblors. Here the prize was
copper which melts but does not burn, and for a few years only–
No town, company shacks long ago collapsed into punk-board or else
carted off for timber. Sun-dapple, drone of the bees as they rise
and fall
And rise again, programmed toward hidden hives. What we would call
a quiet place. Sweat-itch at collar and sole:
No one goes there, said the woman at the end of the road, except they
have something they want to get rid of. Not affective in the same
sense; a scandent
Twilight. Lifting sweetness this time from a single string. And the
forms more various. Licit we should come so far.
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