from Apparition Poems

#220

Poetry from a pure place
is an impossibility: as you
write, even the slants you
tell fall within the purview
of the filthy. So did Emily,
alone in a drafty house in
snow-capped Amherst, as
a dream presented itself to
her of Gods in America. As
those Gods became common,
hovering in or past receptive
heads, the filth was in not just
her words but her life. Solitary
filth— that’s all of us, but the
visionary deadness and the
beautiful scum make pretty
pictures against grains, strains.

#221

Torque: you can start a mile past
personal emotions, but you must
jog back and touch emotion’s very
green blarney stone every few lines
to fulfill responsibilities no one else
wants to engage. Slats of blinds get
shut to keep sun out of your eyes,
even as the torque expresses both
elisions, ellipses, eerie as they form
a blockade of angles to knock you
down. It’s the warp of centuries: “I”
set loose to torque combinations of
data in every way creepy to desires
for raw earth permanence, mountainous
forms. They attract mist, kisses, and the
accursed share of angst that dawdles in
flesh like a child with a blanket.

#222

He told me about his next door
neighbor, an old miser who never
looks anyone in the eye. I didn’t
look him in the eye as he was telling
me this. Later, I realized that a
condition of agedness means, or
can mean, the exact opposite of
wisdom. I was in bed, in darkness,
and I scared myself half to death
as I realized this. We all have neighbors.  

Adam Fieled is a poet based in Philadelphia. He has released five print books: Opera Bufa (Otoliths, 2007), When You Bit . . . (Otoliths, 2008), Chimes (Blazevox, 2009), Apparition Poems (Blazevox, 2010), and Equations (blue & yellow dog press, 2011), as well as e-books like Beams (Blazevox, 2007), Disturb the Universe: The Collected Essays of Adam Fieled (Argotist e-books, 2010), and Mother Earth (Argotist e-books, 2011). He has work in Jacket, Cordite, Pennsound, Poetry Salzburg Review, the Argotist, Great Works, Tears in the Fence, Upstairs at Duroc, and in the & Now Awards Anthology from Lake Forest College Press. A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he also holds an MFA from New England College and an MA from Temple University.