from Sunporch

So the posture corresponds
sun through or on the under-
sides of leaves, a glint like

rosemary hinted toward by
the cup’s lip, though I miss
you, though have polished

metal to mirror, a nostalgia
not of this year but historic,
impersonal, unwell, yet

conserves its lovely heft
shrewd to me, stretched on
a rain couch hands within reeds

from Sunporch

Your syllabus was not desire but
its tributarial wanings had
in mind the cardstock quality of
this yawn I wish contagious so
you will show me not
the refrain but a feeling I know
this song a mouth it is the one
with slices of hound mid wood
fence an effect seasonal in every
season

The Avid Hours

Once I read a math workbook, onto audio cassette

For the blind. Pausing for answers

~

I wish to say too much

As one steps, overdressed, into an unexpected summer

~

Now take a consequential breath

The wedge you cut

Has all the lemon’s juice

~

I pinch the wick. This yellow sign

Has gone white

The children it warned of have gone

~

Filled the well with seed until it absorbed the spring’s last seep and something could blossom slightly there

~

Dear _____,

You & I sit in the center of a long string spooled and counter-strung off branch tines and coiled at a playground ladder’s bend, now lifted to a cradled shape by wind. Hummingbirds can land on it, I won’t mind. I touch each part in case: blood. Elastic like shaved ice, the good ongoing light takes its time, drumming like typing students’ fingers on their rubber, dummy keys.

It comes to me: in _____, you will see Things I could not provide but here the avid hours hold up as a man carying several keyholes around. I recall your agate breath. Roughed lemon in the halo of a hanging copper dish, walls we pressed like in a lung against

~

To say memory undercuts

The present

Sense that memory is perceiving not

In relation to

Yet through the country of

My eyes had no color but what they saw

~

Did you see it he said no she said I saw it the day before and after

~

It takes seven years to be an official

Missing person

They’re taking down the canvas

Around the booths

On the closed streets

~

When you read this I may no longer be in love

~

Rome, 2002

Impatient with sculpture, she nevertheless enjoyed the painted shutters pinned open near dusk. Out one, laundry steam animate as marble wings scrolled violate toward a man bare to his stomach leaning on forearms that could have been two small dogs, the pastry dangling from one hand an errant bone.

The definition of art was once defensible tenderness.

Still, certain the last must be best, yet also that the best is everything at once, she held a book so shade made the page indistinguishable from general dusk in the square. Using a wooden wand, the pancake man spread his batter. Some light leeched from the hook-rug clouds, spanning the fountain’s sway. A section called “We Begin Now to Touch Secretly The Conjurer’s Hands.”

The magician is still assembling his crowd. He directs the few he’s caught to cheer, drawing others in. They applaud the barest moon.

~

Instead you

Gulls in a puddle, not feeding but washing

Because of where I grew

Water is always west  

Zach Savich is the author of three books of poetry, including The Firestorm, and a book of lyric prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand. He teaches at Shippensburg University.