MOTETS
Why should it bother me
To hear them nearly
Match their singing
To the pitch of screws
The traveling choir
Whose joie may never
Come this way again
Though I leapt in the streets
Then
*
At their faces’ mercy
They stare in belief
The children in transports
With you Paula I
Still have these moments
My voice slipping
They say there is a life
Vest under the seat
That we are now free
*
Perfume in testers
In the sense of canopies
In shops with no duty
In the space between spaces
In musics like odor
One wanders through
In the bottle the London
Water is still cold
Though this is Bucharest
*
The modes I prefer
Give onto landscapes
Passing smoothly at great
Faintly perceptible speed
Fields of blue wheat
Stand there vanishing
Image of white wind
Turbines on the slope
Silent because it moves
*
Over the crowded roofs
Calls the hooded crow
The cock’s crowing fills
Cool arcades with grape
I think many men must
Have broken in this station
Where I heard them process
A murderer last night
His unmistakable cries
*
Notes held by Germany
When I was single
“Country lane” had no referent
The second rose functioned
As metonym for the exit
Wound made by a lance
Raw-boned youth wringing
The tail of a balking cow
Hand over fist
*
A return to the endless
Line snaking my castle
Channels trod in white stone
Wind fetched 100 leagues
Through a breach in the wall
Over forest one had not given
To ransom a daughter
Or anyone else
For that matter
*
Tunnels and other voids
In which fear was
First reliably contained
Thistle and caltrop above
Blankets and night soil within
Six feet of concrete
Shot through with bar stock
Two beach views concentrated
Marvelously by iron sights
*
Mesh and coil remains
Of a stochastic trap for minnows
Based on the funnel
Strands formed of shells
Whole strata of skeletons
Plastic and sea glass
As fractions of land mass
Fuel compressed from plankton
Epoch compressed from fuel
*
At noon to cross the bright
Waste separating resorts one
Mile from an aerobic threshold
Drives conflicted as finely
Powdered sugar in the windpipe
Nudists peering down
From caves in the soft cliff
Ruined shoes washing ashore
Like this
THE MONARCH OF THE GLEN
The station approaching the second
Class passengers rise and breathe
Smoke and spirit hard enough
To take me back into that version
Of myself who died of those things
And was cured in the rafters
Two handfuls of orange maize
And a knife in the throat
Was my name day that year
You see this is the continent
Sometimes called the old world
Loc de joaca reads the gate of the
Play area I take it
Reserved for those wearing
A bracelet the combination
Restaurant hotel resort issues
Overnight guests and yet
Here we are climbing
Gangways or catwalks planked
Haphazardly around old growth
Exculpatory signage fluttering
Autumn in an ill place
Everything welcoming or funny
About these mascots bad technique
Has transformed into menace
A dry voice chants from holes
In the face of a fiberglass tree
At the end of a high road
Squirted from a tube
Some great hoof has churned
The limp grass into printed clay
Filling with slips of rain
Put out your hand
I put out the hand
That scarcely closes
Around the deep piled velvet
At the great hart’s antler base
Thick hot veins run up
The back of it like seams
Even seen far off there is
No mistaking a dead thing
And there can be less question
Of a live one even a monster
Conditioned to approach the rail
THE WIRE
Though your talking points
Like a mountain stream
Ran clear and unchanging
It was two decades
I did not study
No I laid down
My head and slept
In a dark carrel
*
Certain verses are lost
Because the phone understood
Them as search terms
You taught me once
We delete everything it’s
Still there only deeper
Legible in the particular
As against the oracular
*
There is no wonder
But the fresh green
Revealed where clear urine
Splashes the greater plantain
Clean of gravel dust
And no name for
The black funnel thrust
Into the awed dream
*
Forests their virginity gone
Approach the castle thanks
All the lunar energy
Fallen on striped land
100% of the energy
Produced here is wasted
I take my song
Chopped and screwed thanks
*
Still the voice catches
When stray balloons appear
Crossing the various sky
What red cursive legal
Tender smell of cocaine
Silence on tape sudden
Wham of body mics
Unclipped and set down
*
We stood and watched
Hot wind blown loud
Though a jagged slot
This is the best
Lavatory in the world
You said to me
Later you said Dad
Can I whisper something
*
Everything in the Communist
Era trains continued working
Long after it broke
Where the steel bowl
Narrowed to a mouth
Sped the blurred earth
It makes me happy
When I stream music
*
These are generous comments
But I won’t continue
Because I am alive
My children between them
Thirteen man-years of joy
All the best songs
Written already in committee
Ok Google take note
*
Is this the air
You were calling for
For four fall days
Native trees looking like
Embers on a pike
Someone shouts look away
Brights on on Meyer
Freeze icons in prayer
*
When we party now
We release the funds
And watch them fall
Like sunbeams through Nyquil
A dead Western people
Who numbered in octal
The flowers of Mendocino
Someone shouts look alive
THE LIBRARY
“Look at your hands” was one
Critical teaching the book I had
From the school library offered
As soon as you know what it is
Look at your hands in the dream
In order to open something
Theoretically like a door to willing
Progress through wherever we are
Sent by night to wander among
Known persons and composites
“Progress” fails to capture it
The promise was total choice
Peripheral highway modulating
Into pine needles and orchids
Among the objectives of dream
Once or twice in the immediate
Sequel to that reading I believe
I came to myself and looked
Down to see my hands
In what was still childhood
Since my priority was to fly
Though I found I couldn’t rise
More than a few feet or travel
Swiftly or with precision
There is a lesson here
No margin can contain
Next I noticed certain light
Radiating through the glass
And it was tomorrow
The day I read no further
Often without waking I enter
Into something like suspicion
This must be it there is
Something I have to do
Else why am I floating
While I look my eyes come
Open and the room returns
To mind like a technicality
I breathe and there is only
This feeling of having known
Cyrus Console is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist from Topeka, Kansas. Console studied biology as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas. He also earned an MFA in writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Kansas. His first book of poetry, Brief Under Water, was published in 2008, and his second book of poetry, The Odicy, appeared in 2011. A memoir, Romanian Notebook, was published in March 2017 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Console is currently a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
