Untils
Some regard the dead
Some are the dead
Rivers walk like blood windows
The deck holds all untils
Until the borderlands of yet
The spirits free as that mythed water
Touch toward you and you feel reaching
Lines of almost to you
Without spirit, regardlessly dead
Then the canal ran through town
It was a snake with emptiness
We were grass in blood dew
The clouds did not linger or place bets
Here, of all places, here, the spring
Obliteration and its discontents
A sorrow of surface
A practical opera
The remedy for vacant lots
A deer wandered into my bedroom
It died there
Pots and pans shed the killing fume
Eggs and eggs and the people for whom they settled
The least of all aspects
Sun in a cup to drink
The ashes lurk unsportsmanlike
Aglow in circles outside feet
Of people promising them buckets
And contraltos for little or no fee
Or terrorforms with temperature in them
The deep collage of probable dead
Sleeps in homes the color of day
Bells indicate the coming
Satan’s heave across x sky
Towers who would try for prolegomenon
Bears with bleeding eyes
And hinges
Disappear in our promises to them
I can hear it in your voice, you are spilling
I am no cup
Trees close in like letters to themselves
In every one I beg
Branches and balloons
Splinters and yellow balloons
Blue balloons and why
Plenty of cycles have reached their end
In the long object to them
And have woken naked in a clearing
On a syndicated radio show
With all the noise and no knowing
An ocean impossibly frond-like just there
Dennis James Sweeney is the author of three chapbooks: Poems About Moss (Radioactive Cloud), THREATS (alice blue books), and What They Took Away (CutBank Books). One poem from this series recently appeared in a portfolio of disabled poets in The New York Times. Other poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Passages North, Poor Claudia, and Prelude, among other venues. He is a Small Press Editor of Entropy, an Assistant Editor of Denver Quarterly, the recipient of an MFA from Oregon State University, and a recent Fulbright fellow in Malta. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Denver.