Maxwell Gontarek
Lattice After Your Advice
No pressure
Can acuity roll longitudinally upon itself as a leaf in bed?
Between the plane tree and the canal
there’s a figure so frequent I can’t really see
lark-like
like yarrow
like the intimate city was intimate in its complacency
an official said
The eye can’t stop it
All likeness is at the edge of its catachresis
What we call a leaf is actually a moment when answers
are no longer seen as organically tied to brushes
But so far interims still lack a history
Between figures floating is floating
Where scenes were were new scenes
They lie flat
At least the apartment is clean
The carwash that used to be here gives the building an invisible hangover
Like I feel cleaner moving from room to room
I count the orphan trucks
I wipe shaving cream from their tires
I count me in
An ant sends its prayers up like an internal staircase tree
As if we took action in order to be outcomes
Action
haunches
between the crown and the pier of figuration
warming something you’re in the middle of
It’s intimate
Relation is a literate ant
We’re tourists all the time
As if the key to liberation was in the disaffected poetics of a carwash
An ant started to walk across the sentences in order
Between the furnace and the pillar of cloud from which the books are written
Between the plainness and civil violence of reading
Figures repeat like a leafy finance
If we read like ants the invention of distance
would be sent up and burst like a balloon
under the moon
which is a book sliding away when you try to read it
looking for its words
Histories like departures are complicated scenes
We loved your conversations
We wanted you to colonize the pain of distance with your acuities
But between the yarrow and the official crown
I was a canal and a plane tree
Or is a tourist gnawing at exact night
Patience
larks
a sail bed
So you pray that we will be so incompatible we find each other in no time
when there is only windfall food to eat
Good fiction is what you read with your legs
No time is an official said
An interim so frequent we can’t really see
but without pressure
It has left a few letters on us
We try not to slide from sentence
to sentence
because it would mean history has forgiven us
But underneath the shaving cream you will be visible again
The figure rolls through the brush for lunch
the thousand seal spitting image
lashes complacency
More only than that
We could stay on the stoop
Lattice After Your Advice
Syzygy tells us the beeline is unglued
That all our letters will be burned
not because they are addressed to nonexistent places
but because they have been adopted by this blossoming downwardness
That we’ll fall into the desiccation of everything not totally ruled by the subject
if we climb any trees
But mostly we ride to the mailbox
or the oaks
It’s a pretty small town
Clarity like silence is a procedure
The landmarks ranch in the bony light of address
Musculature hangs like a souvenir on a museum wall
Tails are complicated appendages
When I was a kid I read any and all earth is the color of being buried
So I threw silt in my eyes and got on the bicycle and the bicycle went to your door
Memory moves like a tail
When we were kids we threw rocks at the windows of our houses
We weren’t trying to be symbolic we were trying to break in
We didn’t have tails yet
The windows didn’t shatter they folded like mica
I can’t help but see bee forms in the shallow depths of objects
a compulsion which holds truer to reality the more it expresses its own negativity
I guess no one ever falls out of that tree
It vitrifies
The capaciousness of veils rots
replacing the vacuum sealed scene with flustered sequence
When the world mollusk releases its tail what will end first?
Scatter
You bicycle in silence like silt
Every day you drown in a colony of letters
The muscle of your tenderness jots underground
and its lines make the potholes of the cities
I am the bicyclist who looks like a beautiful tail
who like a clock wrapped in cotton
before scattering
told me your name
We crash and it glues us
Suggesting the shell form the postal worker pulls us up from the pavement
and says don’t balk at the expense of stamps
it points to God without revealing
The colonial horizon is all covered in mica in that
Let’s sleep under the tree where the rain falls
Despite land
form
Major
Star shower
Perfect basal cleavage
Our nakedness paving us
We were suggestible
The rocks spoke
Stakes fetishes merchandise
On the surfeit of surface
an observation arc begins with whorls
rounded at the base
angled at the periphery
flattened above
and impressed at the suture
A beeline staggers
Its tail is a stamen
To
Each apparent house with tissues in them
The citations in syzygy with their glueyness
What is intervisible
despite landform
hardening like a star
Maxwell Gontarek is a poet, photographer, and teacher. He has poems out or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Posit, Interim, Witness, La Piccioletta Barca, Unbound Edition Press' anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound, and elsewhere. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.