5 poems
from Meanderest
STREGA NONA
Go in old
thorn apple to salt
& spikenard.
The same emplastering
oysters of attention
approaching
boy after hollow boy,
the fig in mordant.
Were there nymphs in amethyst crying
at our expense, was the aura between
them
also
a little addled,
coaxed
in the soap to spur
their wheel of leg.
How they thimble for days half-
forgetting pyramids
of shadow lavender
quickening the glacier
moon over which winged
things
wandered
fog in rutilated fog.
Others grew from the feathers shed in moss pond
meadow ponder but only smoke
survived, amber
thatch in Benjamin water.
I live there in the factory of a feather wristed voice,
a saint’s vision of peacocks waking
in alchemical rain.
Forgive this charlatan his green
glass grain for eyes leaving
their paste on everything he claimed
to see, the chaudron chatter in leaves,
sailors in slow
motion straining from all that open.
A serpent girt with his watery
heart & wax conscience.
I wasn’t always meanwhile made
of wood I stole down
like snow in common water.
Once mine own error but
the creasing flooded
away—
the blue crow
bar of our mouths.
MINOR POETS OF THE CAROLINE PERIOD
A powdered wheelbarrow’s rubicon makes no noise nor sense who sobs in numbers, dabbling
incognito fountaineer. Apostrophe ruins our sooty throat, the prank in its veins. Hence to woodbine.
Asterisk andromeda prolonged. This winter something of its yew-and-roses charm left me flagged in
lichen howling like the lighthouse in a mowing field. This crazy altar jackpot skimmed. I didn’t want
to sell my pain is hymn meter approaching something to dust. We weren’t used to feeding his relation to
object relations. Occulted in the steam of memory. Balanced on the balls of our feet. No art more
gentle than this rogue slowness where blew a wilder time in the ballast. Wearing the spandrels down,
filling the nerves if it would only stay. Ether ore’s prairie story clingstone dictated to our perplex circle
of wet. Dull to temper advice just now learning to write through thaw. Edifice wrecks, arguing overcast
the long way to Westerly. An arm of sable plums sails clean off the map somewhere in this underlying
quadrant. My best friend riff if in mulch revel. How he heckled the exode by its little chafe of
furloughed four-leaf smoke, a gossamer groom for the mock moon’s acreage. A ragweed prayer wheel
in the hiccup of these shambling hands thus spins the computation. Some other point but then the
earthquake in view, the learning curve’s meteor kiss.
THE FUTURE OF FRIENDSHIP
A young man weddyd to the kyng lost his ring
climbing from the Scantic river,
borrowing names from
a map of fountains later scribbled from
his Amsterdam of bed.
A hole in the ice through which the martyr spoke.
What we found in his mouth.
What we saw there waging
bottomless scorch
lark fiction.
The moon’s expiring
paragraph pulls our ankles
down
to the sea.
Mist ache, stochastic stinkbug in
windowsill pollen.
What language wasn’t snow
angel structure engrained
in the drift.
Duraflame. Cheerio.
What Ray Johnson kept there,
left in Locust Valley.
The minor materials of his celery heart
as though yawning down
the boulevard, the flash of flesh
redistributed as rain as the thickness
of his film diminished.
Split zephyr worsted,
a vowel’s accidental ego.
The bird’s choral talking cure take care take care
however briefly in the vein. Collapse
as diagrammed through a veil.
This is a description
of shivering my body asleep in
the photograph, a suspicion living
deep in the dappled.
A glaze misaligned from the universe
harbors some idea of its breadth,
a transferential undertow snagging
either side of the batten.
Its wet-eared circle.
Not wishing to appear
in a hurry lest I happen
across a stone
apt to dazzle, to make
his substrate figure
surface in crystalline.
I lost threadbare to it alone an uncreated
light, the secrets of a river stuffed &
strewn—to this
end with this illegitimate siphon.
Some reckless commonplace
devotion spills, spilling in, into, place.
Kimono of sun, an exoskeleton of
qualm as he leans in.
The nautilus of his groin roped in the Shaker chair.
His massive animacy from
the ring to the wax
without leaving the ring.
A sharpie & 7 across
his chest. Where your cool hand had been.
CAMPO APERTO
If there were one to read it, the fable practiced in our head. The diligence of what wouldn’t absorb
evolved. Perfoliate numquid sown in the gladdened. In swaddle rangling a well-placed smudge
driven round the filament. Distaff an invitation, nova moth & frown, a parchmentizing in the scene’s
scant metabolism. Irrationale, the ravine catastrophe’s comedizing element misunderstood. The urn
geranium. Neither action nor speculation but a middle eye raged just then in sedge. Off went its
wig with the feelings of a bird. Either this or he cried aloud, the powder of making himself
perceptible. Now comes the explanation. Where does the music come from. Should you like to go
elsewhere. The light in the cord. What I meant was stars. Headlong this morning in question, the
last seventh sphere as love to the mossy pot. In the wall, where it was hidden. Hither hinder sunder
when I was a child of pale green sky. Come wrung from it. A crown of tamarisk detachment awes
the cosmos in reverse, the sibyl’s village lost to eventide. Two directions of spirit movement,
shipwreck learning to be still. A shadow quarrel freezing over the field. Were we solid when you
came to the sea. At least an orison. It blew right through me, the morning sings, its fossil beauty.
The thunder in the ark straying hollow beside a leaf. I copied his little cave of anger. What have I
to do with wishful emergency. Say again about the jasper light in my eyes, the Swedenborg of
morning fretted away.
WHIG FEELINGS
Pathos an acorn slain in dew. Not there & some moss.
Oh when will night crystallize in you again.
Also is an acquaintance in the red array
of accident that was the work. An artificial heart, an
artificial sea shall make
ascesis of you
yet—
snow across a barn or beauty from a dust. I sleep now
in the bushes, the bureau angels burgling.
A polite bed surrounded by mint rose
rises in the boat without beholding.
Cloud milk pulls,
my brain for a foreign
neck & feeble morning foliage.
And if affection clogs, if she clings timidly
to avalanche,
these isolated comets.
An anodyne for moth.
Forgive me the arrogance,
he told me.
Permit me to accord with your abler machinery.
I was disappointed & celestial as
snow while you went away.
My awkward life. It ascends,
bride of the precipice, the stars bedecked.
She came halfway home.
Michael D. Snediker is the author of two poetry collections, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, 2017), winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, 2013), a Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry. Additionally, he's the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press, 2021), a finalist for both the Christian Gauss Award and the MLA First Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in journals including Black Warrior Review, ELH, FENCE, The Henry James Review, jubilat, Qui Parle, South Atlantic Quarterly, PEN Poetry Series, Poem-a-Day, and The Tupelo Review. He is the fortunate recipient of multiple Yaddo residencies, and is presently Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.