A Clasp of Some Sort

1
“The Silver Swan”—that’s funny
I thought swans white, unlike
and yet the one who slides out
human, contravened the extra
guttural death encircled, then written
in silver, which is white
in heraldry. By a lake.

2
Once upon a time, a swan
dead upon the mound still
life the nature morte revealed
as the camera came to reveal it
pulling back from the swan upon
heaped things seen where slow
motion incremental clemency
reveal says motion-picture studio floor.
Post-modernism attests to the artifice.
Non-lyric, non-dramatic, non-epic.

3
Downgraded from blue chip
after it failed to meet its estimate
at auction,
the metropolis
fell apart at the seams of snow seasonally
spent at the corners once occupied:
single-proprietor businesses are extinct.
Burst from its Saved Pictures
a swan strains to reach muck as gray as the gray print
nearly invisible in the glare of coated paper
monographic memoirs.
The editor is caput.
Flashing private equity, the raptor is
pleased to consult farewells that
to the archive may be coopted.
From the market,
amid twinges and the cry,
“I shall be standing when the last one of you is out of business,”
we kept a copy of the sting.

Wringing the arcade’s neck.

Of Outcroppings

1
-icity, selected:
Our futurity tableaux
past due what if showers, non-specific
and what then. Here gone World’s Fair Obelisk
but we are thinking omnivorously
of arbitrariness.
To fasten -icity:
we had put our suffix on the table
with mess and casualties
from stains and cigarette stubs buttering
what-not and exasperations
aghast or asleep.

-icity at the podium:
farsighted what’s what
advocating an idea, and saying
we do not have time for second-rate
anchor points, the mild slaughter of a cube
as told to a taxi ride. Ready, set, avant-garde.

2
Of the city, the city’s better errata,
come this odd pair: one
fluent in historical remit, whose particulars accrete
saltbox vernacular architecture; another
given to wit’s breaking several facades, literate
goth in Victorian brick as played by vandals
in the night somewhere, citations galore
and required reading. (Nearby, a remnant
of gas station has survived its one-pump
abandonment.)
These both postmodern, divergent
yet legit.

3
-ism thoroughly and vertigo hurtling -icity
put us on edge over the electric current he meant
for everyone. He meant his patent to electrify the word,
the world.
But giving it away made electricity the life of the martyr
from an ecstatic mind of wires,
much experienced perspicacity of wires
made him a martyr to perplexity
as increase departed from him, and the manicule Here You Now
utopic, his falling action rising.

(Image: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lake Superior, Eagle River, 2003)