Drew Gardner

from Water Table

13

the room had overwhelming opposition
in borrowed answer toward
surroundings of freedom, the latitude
was a shock of recognition offered
in years of shared evidence
as lights from a distant stadium
shimmer in the stinging hail

hurt by something that hasn’t
happened yet, the stars have
sent a spider into your life
to change the channel of unlit
possibilities, now in the crowd
the transgression of love’s will
acting on a wind of indication, or
against it, the diastole of tender
crashes back to where I’m pretty
sure the drum set is, a sudden
laugh that disappears as quickly
as some other thing approaches
skidding into the streets


15

to appear only to grasp the ripcord
the learners come in through a rift
in the gripping machines, your house
bears some of the evidence for this
the full course of combinations is
subject to manifest escalation

the dead stretched out their arms
facing the dimmest memories
that remain arrogant, except
in the shock of liberation
the cherry blossoms numb with faith

the watchers stack flashlights
in generations of imagined soil
grasping for clutter
that contradicts the missing section

I do not believe
the snow, floor entering
the burial site contracts
into lewd trajectories to prevent
the conclusions from trafficking
too much with our costumes

I’ve been baking the windowsill
over the long winter, will you remember
the captive sounds? please drink
them, so they get to enjoy themselves

the night pays a high price for
starving birds, even if the outside
is the way to disappear
into a questionable realization
or rather, to realize that the
rain has frozen to the surface
of the cars.

I am more likely to practice repeatedly
a reverie for a complete absence
and then make a salad, without
nationality or technique, where
the spider between the self and the world
is essentially a function of the parachute
the way nature slaps language across the face