Poems

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A = A

Mine to ask a mask to say, A is not A.

No one, ever the contrarian, to answer.

The moon is both divided & multiplied

        by water: as chance, as the plural of chant.

O diver, to be sea-surrounded by a thought bled white—

        a blankness as likely as blackness.

What is the word for getting words & forgetting?

Might night right sight?

I, too late to relate

        I & I, trap light in sound

& sing no thing that breath can bring.

More by this poet

Boreal

Across the stiffening pond, your steps
        send broken branching signals
Faultless as some harp-tuning 
    
        dedicated to silence: each note
Carries an interior candle of dissonance
        the dark calendar
Marked by a sequence of frozen suns

There is a season deeper than winter
Passing in these 
        tree-diagrams, & mechanisms 
Of common speech

Sleeping under the solstice, you may suffer
Recurrent dreams 
        as the wreckage returns its image

Unburied 
The harp
        a pelvic bone, turns in your hands

But failing (you—the player
Of a misshapen instrument)

Andrew Joron

2010

Spine to Spin, Spoke to Speak

The pilot alone knows
That the plot is missing its
Eye.

Why isn't this "ominous science" 
   itself afraid, a frayed
Identity?

Pray, protagonist —
Prey to this series of staggered instants.

Here the optic 
Paints its hole, its self-consuming moment.
It is speech, dispelled, that 
   begs to begin to ache.

So that wind accelerates to wound, a dead sound
   enlivened by the visitation of owls.

As pallid as parallel, the cry
Of the negative is not the negative 
   of the cry — an irreparable blessing —

A green world's 
   "sibilant shadows" where
The syllables of your n