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Poem
by Joyelle McSweeney


The Wind Domes

Everyone knows that time unfolds
as events into the particular. His shredded shirt

floats down as cloud ripples. These are his motion-
and his power-lines

receding through the valley.

His shoulders one shade greener than the sky.
The valley two shades greener.

go back after –songs waft from the box
encouraging us to go through with it.

                     To be a worthy continuum.
                     To be a moral compendium
                     in the dark green chickpea glade—

                     I’m a kid so I can’t     go anywhere.
                     You’ll have to       bring it to me.

                     —in the frosted flakes of grain
                     in the rushes where, if you pull one up,
                     they scream or interrogate you.

                     Emptied of their po-et-ree
                     they lie in the potters’ field.

                     The vessels, I mean. The protest of the dog
                     in the throat of the evening
                     makes the evening suddenly deep.




The Problem of Knowledge is
what to do with it,
           once you have it.
(Sign this form.)
(Paste a picture of your skiff, here)


           gamboling debt
on the rambling see.
The little deck shifting
like a slopéd glen (Paste
your thumb to it. Thumbprint, you clod!)

a-clearing. The buck’s rack glinting in retreat.

I lift it like a flashcard and it gathers no ____.
Lift it like a fish from life.

and how am I to convince you, if you aren’t here to convince?
Those people just aren’t here anymore.
They split. They left the club. I told you
(I woulda told you) like a bathmat or a bathroom’s drudge
-light to make do with. To make
right by. There is no second life.

Plutonium wristlet appears as a circle of fireflies
as she crosses the humpéd lawn.
The closer they get,
you can see the holes between them.

Slipped from her wrist, plunged to toss in the bed
that ran from the summer capitol.
The river, I mean. Sunk down
to surface again
in the cluster. Magnified.

How it gave off a summery light.