Philip Kobylarz, Arid-zona, Photograph
‘Leave it for the next people
experience is seeing the split cream of gull-breasts
plummeting skyward on a tear of air and eddying
upwards into the frost-box of their bodies
devotion to stone, they said
cured everything, sent
the spruce-lice spilling
from their boles, the
stippled galls deflating
into root-turned earth
this, the woodpecker with its mouth full of knuckles
this, the way firelight
sings on snow.
to be exhausted is to be grateful;
time, then, is a god robed in lupins
braided in loosenings of bright wisteria, stitched
petal-blue with cobs of hyacinth
I wrestle with matter; this is the nature of guilt
the grand exhaustive, missive redly resting
on a shadowed chest
call it energy, call it
the air of falcons, shifting
under the world wide-eye, in
the founder and flare of suns, blood-larks
with handfuls of sky, the earth
a marble in its
blue impunity
each petal is the same, but here
is one I breathed, look, one drifted
stamp that settles on your eyelash here
beneath the slow white wake of bloom and
look, I made it with my voice, you can hear
where each note settled, curved
corners of song and
here, in a cradle of hawthorn
two bodies, one moonlit topiary
bowed beneath the weight of blossom
___________
Inigo Scrace
Review by Theric Jepson
“[E]xperience is seeing the split cream of gull-breasts / plummeting skyward,” writes Scrace, who must know something of experience to share this series of startling images from the realistic (“spruce-lice spilling / from…boles” to the absurd (“the woodpecker with its mouth full of knuckles”). Perhaps these piling images add up to one correct answer but more likely they simply add, creating a mass of imagery that is its own reason to be read.
Review by Jared Pearce
While I’m not sure I buy the idea that “to be exhausted is to be grateful,” I very much agree that “the woodpecker [has] its mouth full of knuckles,” and that we “wrestle with matter,” and that “experience is seeing the spilt cream of gull-breasts.” There are some striking images here that help tip me into the poem’s world.