H u n t e r L a r s o n —
duende at silo city
Infinity is common, daylight is a kind of community.
Bright and audible this morning
leaving western New York.
Not a gray day like yesterday, but it’s colder here
at the far edge of November.
When it rains
in the industrial park, I step into the landscape I invent.
In the city’s bright muscle, clapping my eyes
on radiant dirt, deviating my attention
to where we stood on the platform
performing honesty in the sure light.
The infinite gloss of ‘back then’
periodically sober
in the sublet, binge watching privation.
On weekends we go to disco and die a little.
I’d like to revise that part of my life
where light leaves an impression of nostalgia, dead leaves.
And it’s common, in the city at night
to see yourself just fall out
right out of your own body
to break into stained glass
like the idea of grace isn’t portable, like wake up.
Aesthetic choices take on a symbolic dimension
are rendered like readymades
in the semiotic circle of action
and reaction. But like, I wanna look good
when art feels like a dead thing
swaying in a kind of narcotized breeze.
And then life gets stuffed
and they put it in a museum and it’s sad
and I hate it. And I anticipate the moment
where catharsis breaks into points
and sheds meaning. And then the floor
of the train is like a white lawn
and I hit my head on time’s vertical perimeter.
Blotting out the cityscape with my thumb it’s like heaven
to alter the idiosyncratic facts of vanity
a feeling I let define my life.
Like things are less definite now that memory
has been severed by the delicate longhand of the law.
But like, I wanna write poems you can dance to...
Ginkgo leaves on wet cement
torn cellophane, polyphonic and literally shaking.
A fossil lodged in the back wall
of my heart and life just streaming in the foreground.
I go outside and hang my head
on the idea of fortitude.
The blunt edge of time scrapes me to an ideal.
And then the resonance happens
and a thin column of sunlight falls on the back of my neck
refracted through the prism of a purpose.
I diffuse into the fantasy of stability
and am charged by being
unable to recognize where I used to stay
and who I’ll have to pay to get back there.
Symbolism
An object of love goes through space
Ascribing a reality unto itself
An idea of subjectivity filtered through tone
Begets the pauses in a life
Abstract spaces lit by a glance
The clarity achieved through voicing
The past is the soft delusion of distance
The present is a shiftless beacon
Running through me like the poem does
Inviolate curve
Blank patch of grass
Where the people were standing
Their glittering inner polarity
Losing myself in the delicate descriptions
Of things, a bright tangle of light
Like my life there in a clearing
Pressing my shadow into the ferns
While the people go by with their dogs
Suddenly the song meant more to me
Than anything, a too red jewel
Docking into evening like the night
.