(i)
Wavers, hesitates in its urge
to thicken
as the watertable drops
and we walk toward crisis
in to the everything that is not me,
in to the everything that is not you.
What beautiful lies
fuse the months together
as we try and slip quietly
past creation.
Sorting pebble from pebble,
we pick out the wild ones
and toss them out back
to match the hue of the smokestacks
and the effluents.
This is an age of reason, you say,
pocketing the hint
of something that was just recently alive.
And day is everything the insect has?
(ii)
Ah, the smell of matches, the smell of cut grass,
the darkness we’ve never before known:
Is this why we need a story
to fall into? to truly unseeingly unfold?
And here we are again, away from it all,
freed from a body of wind, casting
shadows upon each other,
moving toward such a sweet secret, turning
each other inside out, turning
towards our other selves.
What does this remind you of, my love?
Marc Vincenz has published fourteen books of poetry, including more recently, Leaning into the Infinite, The Syndicate of Water & Light, and Here Comes the Nightdust. Vincenz is also a prolific translator and has published ten books of translations, including Unexpected Development by award-winning Swiss poet and novelist Klaus Merz, and which was a finalist for the 2016 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. His work has received fellowships and grants from the Swiss Arts Council, the Literary Colloquium Berlin, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry.
