Allan Peterson
4 poems
**
Uncertainty For Sure
Can't be too careful. Nothing about oxygen
and hydrogen predicted water. Just to be sure
enter the door by the right foot. Touch wood.
Watch for threatening rings of water
on deckboards or on darkening rivers under squall
pelted and decorated like bead belts and bracelets.
They contain us as well as the sinister necklace
a circle of immolating tires. The equally real.
How can anyone hate that much.
The carrier Lexington is heading for mothballs.
The ferry from Anacortes leaves Friday Harbor
for Whidby and Seattle with a hundred cars.
How can dense metals float.
The only thing deeper than light in the universe
is dark and what we don't know about ourselves.
We listen to voices from the chimney the houses'
channel to god but bedeviled like mice and spiders
taking shelter in the dryer vent. Demons may speak
up as well from your striped blazer pockets.
Another lifetime exists between heartbeats and sleep.
In the still lake the wide deaths echo as if jewelry.
Island life is like other life --merely suspicious
and harder to get to.
**
Breath Across a Bottle
Between the archipelagos, those of cumulus
and their counterfeits on water,
under which crabs are baffled by chickenwire,
redfish by glitter, it is the agos that strikes me.
To see Africa as Italy, peninsulas
as De Gama, measured minutely like peptides,
like the breath of flies.
The starkening of risky speculation,
clouds born on the spot
that became famous for much of the afternoon,
Portugal, a little sidebar in Europe,
within which, 1419, a sheep was said to speak at birth
in perfect English. It required the ambassador
and the voyage was blessed.
The caravels with such omens could sail closer
to the wind, playing it among them
like shawms, like breath across a bottle, so clever
they almost forgot
wind borrowed for other uses like rivers diverted
leaves nothing.
**
Sleep and Extremes
A technician of vodka took the headaches out
in itself miraculous
Then people who fasted or stopped sleeping
said they did it to know god
How can we meet our own bodies and not
get autographs
feel a twinge in the coccygeal and presume
the postman is holding
a letter long overdue not even ours
that needs postage
and not a strained back from lifting illusions
Night lights are green
in the radar same as the flickers of pancreas
photo bacteria and snipers
in the hills partially hidden by sleep and extremes
So god is a sad apparition
said to be perceivable in both excess and denial
**
This Much is Possible
I love what small things grip glass
saying this much is possible against your breath,
and the trees with the churches
growing out of them above which they jumble.
A fountain is a vaudeville of water
while polishing the edges of bodies in marble,
both impermanencies.
But we are susceptible and want to hang on,
so some Egyptians convinced us
a god would take an interest in architecture.
That was years ago and nature
was bypassed, the trees cut for crossbeams, pews.
Still the fly hangs on shatters
of green glass in the door frame, hollyhock,
chasuble of Mary with deep breaths.
Even the words I submitted to last year for approval
have all this in common:
understanding erodes, nothing prevents it,
faith is the wrecking ball.
**
return to sawbuck 3.4
**
Allan Peterson's latest book, All the Lavish in Common won the 2005 Juniper Prize. Recent print and online appearances include: Gulf Coast, Northwest Review, Ouroboros, Notre Dame Review & Sawbuck 2.1. Work is forthcoming in Shenandoah & Denver Quarterly. Recent prizes include the 2009 Dos Cosas Award, the American Poet Prize, and the 3rd Boom Chapbook Prize. His "Omnivore" is forthcoming from Bateau Press.
**
Uncertainty For Sure
Can't be too careful. Nothing about oxygen
and hydrogen predicted water. Just to be sure
enter the door by the right foot. Touch wood.
Watch for threatening rings of water
on deckboards or on darkening rivers under squall
pelted and decorated like bead belts and bracelets.
They contain us as well as the sinister necklace
a circle of immolating tires. The equally real.
How can anyone hate that much.
The carrier Lexington is heading for mothballs.
The ferry from Anacortes leaves Friday Harbor
for Whidby and Seattle with a hundred cars.
How can dense metals float.
The only thing deeper than light in the universe
is dark and what we don't know about ourselves.
We listen to voices from the chimney the houses'
channel to god but bedeviled like mice and spiders
taking shelter in the dryer vent. Demons may speak
up as well from your striped blazer pockets.
Another lifetime exists between heartbeats and sleep.
In the still lake the wide deaths echo as if jewelry.
Island life is like other life --merely suspicious
and harder to get to.
**
Breath Across a Bottle
Between the archipelagos, those of cumulus
and their counterfeits on water,
under which crabs are baffled by chickenwire,
redfish by glitter, it is the agos that strikes me.
To see Africa as Italy, peninsulas
as De Gama, measured minutely like peptides,
like the breath of flies.
The starkening of risky speculation,
clouds born on the spot
that became famous for much of the afternoon,
Portugal, a little sidebar in Europe,
within which, 1419, a sheep was said to speak at birth
in perfect English. It required the ambassador
and the voyage was blessed.
The caravels with such omens could sail closer
to the wind, playing it among them
like shawms, like breath across a bottle, so clever
they almost forgot
wind borrowed for other uses like rivers diverted
leaves nothing.
**
Sleep and Extremes
A technician of vodka took the headaches out
in itself miraculous
Then people who fasted or stopped sleeping
said they did it to know god
How can we meet our own bodies and not
get autographs
feel a twinge in the coccygeal and presume
the postman is holding
a letter long overdue not even ours
that needs postage
and not a strained back from lifting illusions
Night lights are green
in the radar same as the flickers of pancreas
photo bacteria and snipers
in the hills partially hidden by sleep and extremes
So god is a sad apparition
said to be perceivable in both excess and denial
**
This Much is Possible
I love what small things grip glass
saying this much is possible against your breath,
and the trees with the churches
growing out of them above which they jumble.
A fountain is a vaudeville of water
while polishing the edges of bodies in marble,
both impermanencies.
But we are susceptible and want to hang on,
so some Egyptians convinced us
a god would take an interest in architecture.
That was years ago and nature
was bypassed, the trees cut for crossbeams, pews.
Still the fly hangs on shatters
of green glass in the door frame, hollyhock,
chasuble of Mary with deep breaths.
Even the words I submitted to last year for approval
have all this in common:
understanding erodes, nothing prevents it,
faith is the wrecking ball.
**
return to sawbuck 3.4
**
Allan Peterson's latest book, All the Lavish in Common won the 2005 Juniper Prize. Recent print and online appearances include: Gulf Coast, Northwest Review, Ouroboros, Notre Dame Review & Sawbuck 2.1. Work is forthcoming in Shenandoah & Denver Quarterly. Recent prizes include the 2009 Dos Cosas Award, the American Poet Prize, and the 3rd Boom Chapbook Prize. His "Omnivore" is forthcoming from Bateau Press.
Labels: 3.4, allan peterson, winter 2009/2010
