LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE
We confused heteronomy for synopsis
Mostly everywhere but also in fields behind hospitals
A field that isn’t part of everywhere
like a little house with tissues in it
an uncaused recordation paring a projection of slow authority
There’s the lapse habit too
Moss is boss
Nails by nature
Cuts from above
Toothache tree
It’s a mushy party
The spectral zone where an invisibility can find its form of insurrection
and the spectral zone where invisibility is met by insurrection
Both bounce without finalizing
It’s already noon
The sight in a bouquet of courses meets itself
It’s not really time but a kind of backlit
It’s more like a city sized tent than a hospital
With beetling clefs
Sounds about
The asymptotic tendency in this sentence time
hasn’t changed anything on the contrary if not
revived in indifferent veins it will never be
more than the backwash of first discordances
The sub
merge
The correspondences douse
Curt
bouquet
The white flower of basil
and the white sky yesterday brought the old locomotion
green
with its tender
it was raining
And after a movie like that you might be a little hungry sure
but imagine if you were full
imagine if you were up to your ankles
where would that put you?
But we’re not as said as all that
though yes it’s hardly a city out here
And I can’t take my eye off the tree
A body’s insistence that its embeddedness could implode
any em
bed
Odile when you synopsize Eliot you’re like a hospital the very white smoke rose
Your price would make you worthless if you didn’t say what if I want to give ourselves away
This I
looking up and seeing from this
capital
Lares
were united to us in vain
The white tent the green tent
carted
The movie draws a hot bath your portrait
Because this page loves through nascent abstraction
The purchase your life has on the present amounts to someone’s sense
of what gets laid at the feet of someone’s cause
which someone sees as non-identical with itself
The ascetic tendency to ask the atmospheric for an apricot and think
the snow is an omen
and the toilet door is an omen
The Celan reflex
thinking the pollard
on my fork
is a bouleversement
In any case
I mean it
the new minuses you countermanded with your meta-position are arriving already
as vultures flying into powerlines bursting into flames falling on fields starting wildfires
Tented recorder
You can ask me anything
But I won’t say anything you like
Instead we find ourselves on a tissue shaped cliff
The fabric is so thin in places
I wished this was true
For all I know we are still luggage
or the desire to be luggage
Cartridge apricot and basil cords
Care
we didn’t like the spite form you came down in
but we were glad that there was something to keep in touch with
however negligently promissory it was
We took you to remember it is not our families who stare at our faces
but the violence of an affirmation of a particular form of the possible
Cages are interesting too
a bit like boats
like violins
What opens and dirties and over
laps us is
there are other vegetable gardens
where the ignorance is more crystal clear
But underneath frog
it’s green as pepper
LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE
Gauze in the Mojave
in the morning
green as pea soup
in the morning
is using a word whose latitude I can’t locate
When it melts into air this should be understood as a resurgent process
rather than a dissipating one
But why would you say over there twice unless you meant here once?
You say because you say
everything twice
It happens to everyone
Each lungful takes you over
After breakfast
you told us every time cannibals were mentioned
we should understand this as a metaphor for eating words
not literal cannibals
I think you meant all experience is contingent
But when I see green spaces in cities like these
I think there was something in us
the whole time
By the home rule sun
ubi sunt
I am baked by the light of a near moment which I am told is also in me
therefore I am baked from within
I am baked by a near eternity into a meringue
Could you eat me too?
Somewhere in what I call my self
there is an intrusive burial
The irreducibility of the bodies behind me and within me
make conversion into historical value impossible
Most of the time this is covered in a just landed gauze
from the thinnest air
Or a green mound
But weight is uninteresting
A small lens grinder runs back and forth
between the flatness of this moment and the flatness of eternity
and I think he’s my lungs
Tell me the story about the desert twice
I had a long day so I started with pairings
I liked it because it was nothing like the spread
When someone says I
Bake
A spoor like an Oranienburg
They dug a hole in my baby and it is called traducement
Ageless hulls
hegemony
to grow two tongues
like butterflies
Natchez is a city in Spinoza
The self is connected by many leashes of flatness
An almost invisible protagonist enters a restaurant and orders pea soup
Coppicing themselves
words constantly reinvent
the indistinguishable as the impersonal
as soon as they get a whiff of selfhood they furrow sorta
The tablecloth this morning
a gauzy lung
A flatness on which a line joining any two points on it would wholly lie
Come here
Did you eat today?
Maxwell Gontarek has poems out in Works & Days, Tilted House, Posit, Denver Quarterly, Witness, and elsewhere. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.