the third person, Steve Parker

Judith Nelson, Vespice, 2014, 26X30


the third person

Come on, baby, do the low commotion—Alice Aforethought

she doesn’t say

take (James Brown, say)

“it is a channel a fuzing [glass] in which the newborn
swell (8) alchemic (such commotion in the materia
is by and large) (you don’t say)” O take it O take it to

we are trying to speak but they won’t hear
from afar we are trying to speak—

cable-stayed, clappered, cantilevered,
the pontoon and moon of a goose’s neck o’erreached
(1 Across: ancient archbishop comes as a wrench?

—eek the whiplash curve of dispatches, communiqué—

(in which a both ways flux it hangs between
as potency and potential forth and back both
ways they are talking as mist in the talking glass
shapes that arise one upon another)

now take matters into your own s/pan

between us a co-motion an interflow that is the place
where we must look)(the hole in the sky)
the airbridge across which [a secret] terror passes
(puntus and pontifex and the Etruscan blank

sacred waters, confluence [mytholm] rising
to emit you—of sighs and foaming size

(such a dazzle and swirl I thought upon me)
(such the topography of the converse
streaks they were)
(such streaks that fell slow as wartime)

                     (cloud)(static)(cloud-)

chamber between us, speak (your desire)
                              of fear
 (life) stasis in this 
 our most honest 
 engine

_____________
Steve Parker

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