The Grove
I know this place–
sap-hot pinons cedars bark
like shavings of wool like rotting
corn silk
the junco darkeyed scrub lover
scabbing
the dry bottoms for spore and flotsam
siskins delicate as lace
from a forgotten century–
all emergent
edged
by a stillness
beyond observation
recognition–
like this apple tossed
into rice-grass blue grama
by the driver of a passing ATV
a quantum swirl
of flies about it.
The Storm
This is the lie I tell.
That I am South of Boston.
That I am the Great Bay, chop and white-cap,
north wind shouldering a tidal heave,
the fire burning in the house by the shore.
See, I say, the spark of the battered transformer,
the whaler straining against its slip,
beating the bulwark into dark and splinter.
Yes, you reply, as if from a great distance,
pointing toward the lights that sputter the horizon
like holiday sparklers.
And it is why I love you.
Because of the way you will clasp your hands together
out of glee or concern,
or an unconscious reaction,
one hand seeking the other
out of the desire for company.
I understand, so I tell you, I agree, I acknowledge,
it is frightening to be alone,
to watch the fires grow brighter, blinding scarlet,
white, filled with shadow,
equidistant, linear,
a roaring boundary marking the frontier of an unrecognizable land
where there is no-one to accompany you
into your unknowing.
It is the way our empires dissolve,
like split wood and fire beetle,
north of char and smolder,
west of inlet and east of arrival.
No one can name it.
We can not even name ourselves
now that the world our name was anchored to
has become as unleashed from itself
as a circus predator.
You, yourself, have become an incoherence,
like spittle on a ceramic heater.
For this is your body, aging, bracing its limits,
the body of Rome, Of Zhao, of Sumer, of Cuzco,
of your dissolution,
of your unanswerable.
Now there is nothing left but to surrender to your wish,
to resolve yourself within your abstract hope
that some encompassing good
will receive you.
Hold me, you say.
And I do.
Bullet
I
Distant, nephritic, ocular,
The telescopic flare
A drape of stillness
to cover him
a rag
to blind
the cut
cochineal
dermal
porphyric casket
where the blood
has settled.
II
Cold now
Retinal and circumspect
That rough coronal
The pock interior
Like a polyp
A dead star
Ingrown clot
On the dull skin
Of his onceness.
Randall Watson is the author of No Evil is Wide (Madville Publishing, 2017), which received the Quarterly West novella prize and was a ‘favorite’ in the NYC Big Book Award; The Geometry of Wishes (Texas Review Press, 2018), a finalist in the Juniper and Tampa Review Poetry Prizes; The Sleep Accusations, which received the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize at Eastern Washington University, 2007 (currently available through Carnegie Mellon University Press); and Las Delaciones del Sueno, 2005, translated by Antonio Saborit with an introduction by Adam Zagajewski, published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico. A new graphic edition of No Evil Is Wide came out in August of 2023 (Madvillle Publishing).