Matthew Woodman - Seven Poems
Singing Along to the Roadside Graves
Plastic flowers pass as collateral beside the white pillar candles before the barbed wire hold your breath the broken glass repeats all laissez-faire about being ground to sand three white horses no three white trucks slippery with bumper stickers scrape the shoulder on their way toward the sun nodding off the coastal range we share a sky dried apricot and blue raspberry ask to lower the volume auctioned off to the vacant bidder what’s that you say what else should we leave sunk where vultures collect slow skunks and squirrels caught odds and even vanilla wax the moon bloom songs that with our windows rolled down parade & beyond us
It’s About Time
As the sun logics the sky --
As the premise we may indulge on our wrists the fondling of minutes --
As the lab cultivates an ear that hears nothing --
As the page sterilizes through right angles --
As the cursor corrects grammar and the hand double-clicks each gyre --
As the bearer kneels for a deadline extension --
Gloves peel clouds for stars
as descending the ridge, I mumble the line
“little man that I was” from the James Tate
poem “The Eternal Ones of the Dream”
as I consider the individual
creosote spanning 11,700 years
as I flail against the pressure gradients
we label as shortness of breath or
as gusts we measure in miles per hour
and hats blown from our heads.
: as d ark – m at tered be e as need les as
yel low as pulses of pollen as g old as
nec tar s pool s as re frain as green as
chor us ra in - scent as res in r is es as
th read s as cirr us - root currents leaf as
now see (d) s al ways a s a s a s . . . :
continually changing conditions
some say bad people become barn owls
when they die some say to see one above
a house foretells an imminent death some
say to place an owl’s ashes on a lunatic’s
eyes some say an owl in each corner
protects from lightning the home some
say thou shalt not eat any abominable
thing some say to place on the dreamer
an owl’s feather is to discover their secrets
tongue like a palm
through the lips flight
feathers so thin you could
read a biography through
the unpigmented outer
primaries those finely
trailing edges
Conglomeration
As I ascend the alluvium I wear
away the top layer of loose stone I am
an eroding factor
altered for having been
here I am a direction of spliced lines
your fingertips abrading
the path one page at a time
& when I slip
the land slips
beneath my scraped &
bloody palm
& when I clap
the land claps
back to where we began
which is just to say
a series of words
thumbing a field
Illiquidity
Neither supple nor plied
with grace but sentenced:
a masculine, misplaced diction
contingent on pockets & dry palms:
three card monte, a six of verbs
pebbled in the mouth: a subject
the Cactus Wren
plants in one of
its (false) nests
Floating End Parenthesis
Birdsong: laughter
becomes tumbling
White-Throated Swift
outlines marking
the open
slim
vault
coming together
& falling
into place as bits
of grass of feathers
as shallow half-
saucers fastened
horizontal
to the sporadic
caesurae
the aspiring
precipitous
swell of lung
tomorrow through
the crevice
a pause ) & then
a perhaps
doubt flocks to
the roofs of
abandoned store
fronts doubt
roosts in piles of
unopened bills
doubt whistles
through the gaps
in doors and
windows doubt
pecks at
prepositions and
subordinating
conjunctions with
a sound like what
if what if doubt
scratches at the
surface and
swallows what’s
unearthed doubt
waits for the cars
to pass before
calling what has
been struck limp
and unfeeling
doubt preens each
punctuated
certainty
To Identify the End of a Portion of Text
look to where the font flickers
its dark tail on the conspicuous
irreconcilable eye-level perch
where see what’s been missing.
By summer the spring
Say’s Phoebe pair bonds
will have flown their separate
marks of terminal punctuation
-- after having --
encoupled a stanza
a son from spider-
web hair & bits
of paper