David Welch
Dispositions
The boy pressed himself in the river with stones
smoothed by the pulse of the water, his veins
blue inside his wrists, blood pushing beneath his skin
as if the river were inside him, the sea dragging it always
down, its doubled beat turning
at its end back into the heart.
How have you found me, the boy said.
Like a bottle, said the audience. We cannot bear to see
how we left you here, a little clipped, a little green
under the sun, to drift back toward the sea.
If I am a bottle, the boy said, what is inside me.
Isn’t that the question, said the audience.
We find you floating like a bottle in the river;
uncleanly, little by little filling so you soon sink
like a boy left to drift alone toward the sea,
looking for the lower lights and prisms of jellyfish,
the softsexed bodies inking themselves into the dark.
In the sea, the boy said, mustn’t one look always forward
for the shore, as if without a lighthouse, the blood
slowing in the fog. Isn’t that the question,
said the audience; one in the fog must always leave
their dispositions out at sea.
If by Its Fur a Fox
The moon is nowhere said the audience
Yes the boy said the fox is nowhere too
And the faces we hold in our heads the straw fires
of our fingers the bees are nowhere
& the trees The world is nowhere the boy said what is this
When we find you in the sun as if a fox
said the audience hanging
by its fur Will that be the end of it the boy said
No Here is the world
said the audience and here is what to do with it
What do I do the boy said like an animal
here with its tongue on my neck Here is the world
said the audience Here is what we do with it
We can see water
in the distance The boy said an oasis
How do we come to it said the audience The water is nowhere
and it is rising it is
rising as if over sand and into the air
said the audience It is rising
The boy said So we can drink it
said the audience when we are nowhere
Yes yes we can drink it the boy said
What do we do with it when we are done
Murder Ballad
a translation for Jack Spicer
Because the figs withered
in the tree, the roots broke.
Your penis has broken
because you were dropped
on your head. A tumble
of broken roots.
At the root, a god.
You have fallen through the branches.
The Trees Having Already Prepared for Winter
1.
Because he is walking in space,
the boy is weightless,
the audience observing
his surroundings
and how they look
at once bottomless
and shallow, a clear
lake under midnight,
no light because in the end
the end is only an absence
of color, no sound though
the world below is thick
with breathing, the trees having
already prepared for winter,
winter having already
prepared its audience
of snow to remember
the leaves: green-on-green
luminaria of noonlight
canopied over the sidewalk
and switch grass, chirr
of wind inside the ear,
footfall and rustle, little
death. The body enters
the world wet with breathing
and for a moment
it is weightless, the soft
branches of its bones nearly hollow.
2.
He had made it a rule
for many years of his life,—
on the first Sunday-night
of every month
throughout the whole year,
—as certain as ever
the Sunday-night came,
—to wind up
a large house-clock,
which we had standing
on the back-stairs head,
with his own hands…
3.
Inside the ear is a timepiece
made of wind. Inside
the wind: a table, chairs;
torso of a grandfather clock
lording over the room.
Generally the hands outline
such observations.
The house is built
inside the wind
and carried from country
to country like a glass
bottle sheltering
a small ship in the sea.
The clock ticks its wrists.
There are seven types of air
across the seven continents.
4.
White air, blue air,
Air of an Unopened Bottle
in the Sea. Air of feeling
across the skin of milk
left long and drying
in its pail, the woods
taking in the sharp scent
of its ghost so completely
it cannot be detected.
The space between the trees
keeps on contracting,
squirreled into itself,
seed entering the dark
stomach of the ground,
travelling nowhere it will not
be found, eventually,
when it crosses wholly
back into the world.
What to see, what to
see, the trees say,
the seams of their roots
reaching out toward
the sea, its depths darkly
full of empty spaces
where the air can
compress into its gears.
You see what is seen
and then you move away.
David Welch has poems recently published or forthcoming in journals including Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, & Typo. The poems published here are from his collection, Everyone Who Is Dead, forthcoming from Spork Press in Fall 2018. He lives in Chicago & teaches at DePaul University, where he is Assistant Director of Publishing & Outreach. Visit him virtually at www.davidwelch.me