Four Poems

from storm still

Attempts / The Storm (Maudlin)

Obviously the world is failing:

Obviously democracy is mediocre men in pools of shit, colliding, smudging shit on everybody’s heads:

Obviously the brambleberries picked along the riverside were falsely placed to navigate our day-blind carrying on instead:

Obviously the ankles that were growing in the place of palms:

Obviously the lowers that were sprouting from the crevices:

Obviously the buboes in the unthought reckoning of pits:

Obviously I widened as a fox that clenches teeth at birds:

Obviously beneath our heads the crinkling of a burning book:

Obviously beside our heads a storm sends thunder through our ears:

The third? The fourth? A hand? A lightning? Then a cold surrounding air—

What’s the point if yellow lowers grew where ankles used to be?

And if the cat sits on your head? And if the cat sits on your head?

And if you’ve folded up the loads of laundry left beside your bed?

And if it were for nothing, and for nothing you went on instead?

Attempts / The Storm (A Whisper)

Resist the will to disappear.

The trees are green.
The trees are green.

Resist the will to disappear
in order to appearance.

Attempts / The Storm (Flies)

There didn’t used to be flies.

There were always flies.

There were always flies.
There were always waters.

A ship was made of wood: a plank
was good enough: I

carried I across the lake; across
the sea; across the channel;

while, storm-still, bilge, its pulsing
world, became the mind,
defiled.

There were never flies.
There were never waters.

A ship was not a word: A gesture,
good enough: How

often could I—
could I—carry on?

How often
could this couldness carry on?

How soft is fleece
that softens in the sun?

How many times
can I get up? How many

times can I go on?

How many times the spilling on the
ache and you ache through them.

Spilling out and out and ache and
you and ache in falling do we?

Go? And do we go? And do we
all go with them? Do we are we going

on and on about this aching? Is our
quaking blatant disregard for your

confessed outbreaking?

Well?

Requiem, still

1

Holding off the end of day, I wake into the night.

2

I wake into the stillness of my sight.

3

The stillness of my sight looks upward, feels you looking down;

4

The night’s unmasking burrows into frown.

5

Still as stillness; stillness as again;

6

the body’s body fading; the fading body’s end;

7

the end of minerality, marauded or marooned;

8

we set forth for the frown of all-too-soon.

9

Still as windswept grasses; still as then;

10

still as night’s unmasking; day’s upend;

11

still as meekness; shaking; still as death;

12

still as lightning’s lightening intent.

∩

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn. Recent work can be found at mercury firs, Black Sun Lit, Conjunctions and elsewhere.