by Michael Palma

In the afternoon the women sit
Among teacups, talking among themselves.

The secret lover is in the street
Walking past, straight as young corn.

Their lips purse as they speak of him,
Their knees draw closer together.

In the night the women lie asleep,
Floating to the furthest reaches of their waves.

The secret lover comes into the bed,
Moving in smiles in the buttery silence.

In the morning nothing is left
But a sweeping curve along the sheets.

by Michael Palma

A poet sits in a quiet town,
In a wooden boardinghouse
Half a block from the railroad station,
Watching the sunset filter down,
Lacing a poem in his mind,
Rubbing the lines and wondering
Why what holds the houses together
Eludes him like a snapping string,
Wrapping his mind around the question,
Leaning his forehead on the blind.

A soldier sits in the railroad station
Thinking about a piece he had,
But that was in another country
And everybody there is dead.
The light hangs steady in his brain
And all the harpoons in his side
Don’t burn him now that he is learning
To feed the leather in his skin,
Skin that sits waiting for the train
Existing just to carry him.

A poet sits in his easy chair
As midnight creeps across the street,
Listening for a lonesome whistle
Moaning on the laden air.
Just beyond the town the dreams
Growing and hiding in the woods
Tempt him toward another harvest.
Clouds fall open, and the drizzle
Comes to him on little feet
Dripping along the window’s seams.

A girl sits in the clacking train
Aimed at the city, on her own,
Drawing faces in her notebook,
Hiding behind the local rain,
Looking at the little station
Where a soldier swings his bags aboard,
Clutching dreams and expectations
Like a blanket to her heart,
Staring around her in impatience,
Waiting for the world to start.

A poet sits on his lumpy bed,
Timing his cigarettes toward the dawn
As the quiet little hours contract
Like drying leather around his head.
The clouds are swallowed in the night,
The raindrops on the glass are blinking.
He reaches over to the table,
Tears the easy poem down,
And sits all night in lamplight, thinking
Of the lines around him, good and tight.

by Michael Palma

The voices trail away and the movie ends
With the camera moving further
And further away, the trees on the ridge
Filling up the frame,
The people growing smaller and more lost.

Then as the lights come up we sit and blink,
Not wanting to touch each other,
Not wanting to think, wanting to be
Inarticulate and fluid,
Heaving, finally bursting from the tree.

We separate and shuffle along the street.
We stand at the curb a moment
Watching the rain, watching traffic flash.
As we fade into the night
Sprockets propel us, light shines through our skin.

by George Quasha

from dowsing axis preverbs for Robert Kelly

1 comfort folly
Reality is the line where rival gangs of shamans
fought to a standstill.
Robert Anton Wilson

You never get good at surrender.
It’s tough quitting our fiery skies to fool around with Persephone.

Impermanence inconveniences permanently establishing passing
value.

Life slips not without standing outside itself.

Message hides inside itself say like the whorehouse crouching in
mind back under.

Fire in the lie about meaning brightens.

I take refuge in a heartbeat.
Separate sentences comprise current aspirations talking this out
of me.

Foolish food is nurturing unknowing we can’t keep a name on.
I’m just dancing in this particular hot tublike St. Vitus horizon.

Take picturing off edge as how you hear yourself coming and
going.

New linguality is failing to regret in time.

Being born asks no other permission.
I lose my edge as a matter of opinion.

Dying is the sole apology for sustained happiness in troubled
times.
The timely torque comes between us and no one, and where else?

Garbling our undertext corrects when we run the horizon.

2 lumen logo locomotion

No pain, new frame.
There’s a discipline of mind that reads all sides at once to live
double.

When a god is bored you get us.
Writing thinks it’s in eternity, so.

If we knew what moods are for we’d know better than life being
for.
Self goes beyond my version of itself listening from outside.

Heaven is a with liking unrequired.
Not trying to get it right leaves it open for the other right now.

There’s a ghost of meaning between.
The syntax off edge rises to a kick back.

Why always posing contrary listening when anything said turns
on itself by the end.
Crisis of faith is short for weakening syntaxis.

The standard for poetry telling why it does what it does is mind
studying mind.
I’m now clearly a prisoner of preverbiality constructed for calling
itself off.

Bright heavenly haven of disciplined dissolution is a species of
faithful holding.

The eye fills lingually.

Time of line is a horizon of seeing meaning. Stretch on over.
Rhythm is true written into bone.
Horizon reading is where all reality is falling in line on the line at
once.

5 [de][re][com][struction]

Life teaches setting out saying one thing and ending up saying the
other.
Why a thing wants to be like and liked reaches into root mystery.

The on high chews us through.
The thing seen sees through me.

By grammaticalities in a conversational mix you can know
yourself strange again.
Lingual valence goes by winds in the kinds.

The sky is falling is the order of statement that comes down hard.
Lingual violence goes through minds in binds.

Always always limits.
The house of being caving in on itself is a syntax.

Self can’t bear being too new non–stop.
And now the epistemological need to slip into something a bit
more comfortable.

The other side of the image retains whispering history.
The poem is out of hearing.

Coupled lines tell on each other to no end unrecorded.
Acts are true facts.

Finally the picture falls through itself warning on eye contact.
Language learns grasping light yet textured to the touch.

Once other never other like lines of sight in and out of phase.