Allan Peterson
3 poems
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return to sawbuck 2.1
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Allan Peterson is the author of two books: All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize ) and four chapbooks. Recent print and online appearances include: Perihelion, Press 1, Bat City, Marlboro Review, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Seattle Review, Runes. New audio is posted at www.Qarrtsiluni.com; new poem/art featured at www.uwf.edu/panhandler & new work forthcoming in: Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Swink, American Life in Poetry.
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Which is Which
Sleep is luscious but I am antsy for morning
to pick up where I left off trying
to remember everything that happened
Did the storm surge make it under the covers
Was the Great Spoon Being after all the rowboat
lost in David’s purple tea made from hibiscus
Whether the little wet snap in my knee
I heard reaching for trailing laces was in or out there
So many ways to say anything
all equally real
So easy to open like the flooded ants another lower nursery
until form is merely a connivance
reaching through ideas like muffled voices or downpour
calling through the dark earth
close and echoless despite a million feet
Every pretense is a fear of bafflement
The world is churning fluxed a stew on simmer
so we think we must separate its parts for clarity
like tap water from old pipes settles out rust
and unspeakables
till it clears like Fall at Mystic Seaport
In archaeology we expect revelation farther down
Unable to escape
from ourselves we descend sieved numbered named
perfectly preserved
We fool ourselves into being
two-sided despite the facts - one good as in a photograph
one ignored
Faces signed with light as the word implies or having wires
throughout a wall and inferring from the light
a mind
Sleep is luscious but I am antsy for morning
to pick up where I left off trying
to remember everything that happened
Did the storm surge make it under the covers
Was the Great Spoon Being after all the rowboat
lost in David’s purple tea made from hibiscus
Whether the little wet snap in my knee
I heard reaching for trailing laces was in or out there
So many ways to say anything
all equally real
So easy to open like the flooded ants another lower nursery
until form is merely a connivance
reaching through ideas like muffled voices or downpour
calling through the dark earth
close and echoless despite a million feet
Every pretense is a fear of bafflement
The world is churning fluxed a stew on simmer
so we think we must separate its parts for clarity
like tap water from old pipes settles out rust
and unspeakables
till it clears like Fall at Mystic Seaport
In archaeology we expect revelation farther down
Unable to escape
from ourselves we descend sieved numbered named
perfectly preserved
We fool ourselves into being
two-sided despite the facts - one good as in a photograph
one ignored
Faces signed with light as the word implies or having wires
throughout a wall and inferring from the light
a mind
**
Form Follows Friction
We can manage an obsession
from as normal a place as Cedar Rapids,
a town like any in America with streets named for trees
or a river for what it does through its adjectives.
We might have a table and three wooden chairs polished by recalling
the last century and the hands that made them
from rock maple.
We seldom hand-write any more
but paste in something from a text program
and hate to have something go by without a name
so Blazing Star, Walking Stick, Savory, acknowledging ancestors,
small flowers riding coach through alfalfa.
The buttes and mountains
seem to move on their own, circling the car,
disappearing without getting closer.
It’s like taking a familiar path
to a known destination but sometime stepping off the path
over new ferns and harebells
behind the oak on your way to a fallen log
to slug eggs and microclimates, the eyes of a wood nymph
coming loose from hot leaves.
Later
when the angry voice next door yells to a child
or a dog with that sharp edge,
you know it’s something helpless by the tone.
You see how far down the tyrannies go, form following friction,
how the valued can be lost or regained just by a voice,
by the power of a word, flower, wood rot, a shadow,
a mountain going soft in time.
We can manage an obsession
from as normal a place as Cedar Rapids,
a town like any in America with streets named for trees
or a river for what it does through its adjectives.
We might have a table and three wooden chairs polished by recalling
the last century and the hands that made them
from rock maple.
We seldom hand-write any more
but paste in something from a text program
and hate to have something go by without a name
so Blazing Star, Walking Stick, Savory, acknowledging ancestors,
small flowers riding coach through alfalfa.
The buttes and mountains
seem to move on their own, circling the car,
disappearing without getting closer.
It’s like taking a familiar path
to a known destination but sometime stepping off the path
over new ferns and harebells
behind the oak on your way to a fallen log
to slug eggs and microclimates, the eyes of a wood nymph
coming loose from hot leaves.
Later
when the angry voice next door yells to a child
or a dog with that sharp edge,
you know it’s something helpless by the tone.
You see how far down the tyrannies go, form following friction,
how the valued can be lost or regained just by a voice,
by the power of a word, flower, wood rot, a shadow,
a mountain going soft in time.
**
Synchronicity
Writing in the dark to the myth between the metaphors,
to the hawks afraid to cross water,
commensals, herbivores, to whom it cannot possibly matter.
In childhood, the long wingless inconvenience,
I breathed faster to hasten my growth,
anxious to put on my own clothes in a home of my own
with safe objects, starch into sugar,
rattles of hand bones and a thousand books.
I wanted to say what it tastes like, everlasting nouns
and parkland in a single room.
I read silently how the skull meant vanity
the year I had measles
and at the moment of burning the skin is sterilized.
In the pages that followed, the animals influenced stars
and coincidence. Our canary
voided an egg while flying from the cabinet to a chair
the moment a robin broke the window
with its neck, my rabbit screamed from a dog, and Jupiter
boomed the horizon.
Among the products of reason is infection in the abstract,
geometric quiescence, in boats going out
to dampen water with their nets, candles weeping
for the sadness of combustible fats.
The reason for this is everything at once, acausal,
as the sun’s gold coin
melted before me, or a mirror refused us.
At the bottom of the cage we had shredded newspaper,
so in the nest the babies were raised
in the swaddling comfort of car wrecks, marriage,
pictures of MacArthur and his famous speech,
the first words pleading to the candle shedding its light
not to spread fire, to poignancy, and the unanimous
sea-starved Minnesota.
Writing in the dark to the myth between the metaphors,
to the hawks afraid to cross water,
commensals, herbivores, to whom it cannot possibly matter.
In childhood, the long wingless inconvenience,
I breathed faster to hasten my growth,
anxious to put on my own clothes in a home of my own
with safe objects, starch into sugar,
rattles of hand bones and a thousand books.
I wanted to say what it tastes like, everlasting nouns
and parkland in a single room.
I read silently how the skull meant vanity
the year I had measles
and at the moment of burning the skin is sterilized.
In the pages that followed, the animals influenced stars
and coincidence. Our canary
voided an egg while flying from the cabinet to a chair
the moment a robin broke the window
with its neck, my rabbit screamed from a dog, and Jupiter
boomed the horizon.
Among the products of reason is infection in the abstract,
geometric quiescence, in boats going out
to dampen water with their nets, candles weeping
for the sadness of combustible fats.
The reason for this is everything at once, acausal,
as the sun’s gold coin
melted before me, or a mirror refused us.
At the bottom of the cage we had shredded newspaper,
so in the nest the babies were raised
in the swaddling comfort of car wrecks, marriage,
pictures of MacArthur and his famous speech,
the first words pleading to the candle shedding its light
not to spread fire, to poignancy, and the unanimous
sea-starved Minnesota.
**
return to sawbuck 2.1
**
Allan Peterson is the author of two books: All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize ) and four chapbooks. Recent print and online appearances include: Perihelion, Press 1, Bat City, Marlboro Review, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Seattle Review, Runes. New audio is posted at www.Qarrtsiluni.com; new poem/art featured at www.uwf.edu/panhandler & new work forthcoming in: Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Swink, American Life in Poetry.
