Archive
That Element
the one after Earth, after Air,
after undercutting Colorado
and making unapologetic ruins,
after tugging on the moon,
after Fire, and remembering
some of it disguised
as winter in the fridge,
shaggy and crystalline,
stiff with fish:
that one,
what I was most of while alive
by Allan Peterson
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Waterspout
Waterspout a tooth out of heaven
bites down slowly hollow like a viper’s
You can see it sending displeasure through
The water is disturbed and sends up vapor
like smoke from a drill bit If it bites deep
it may spin fishes till scales fly off
from their bodies You can hear it
rushing through downpour with a sound
like vacuuming and small coins falling
by Allan Peterson
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Monthly So the Moon
Moon with its most voice, size,
has called again water off the near shore,
and sea grass, all combed, points to its exit.
Gulf and green oceans beckon the blood.
And the same cool friendless planet, lonely
for fluids, calls larger on the sea masses,
after which even cupfulls incline to it, glasses
tip their meniscuses and tank cars list
slightly on their tracks.
Even the ospreys about to dive
must respond in a small way, and everything liquid,
we in our blood baths, faintly lean
to the place where water uncovers
the wishful moon, the purpose of its gravity:
a few treasures, hermits, the closest stars.
by Allan Peterson
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Audition
The enormous orb-weaver Nephila
hangs her old microphone under the eaves
Each touch of life points to her and sings
to her weaving legs like a star’s twinkle-points
Each voice steps up and croons through her diaphragm
She listens to her legs She hears the song
of something delayed its frantic wings sugar-glazed
She moves with her quick lace napkins
and composes a white note concerning a fly
by Allan Peterson
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Emergence
Rivers in the winds and overcast greys focus into doves,
condense out of sighs and pearl dust.
Pool chairs loll out their pillows, blue tongues,
evidence that energy organizes new life
as water braids above rocks out of speed and enthusiasm:
new forms from eagerness and rush, just as history
preserves a name. Wallingford says there was a river
where oxygen and wagons might pass.
Nothing dishevels a thing like water.
It makes and unmakes innumerable existences.
Dustbirds and skyscrapers reconvene when the wind lessens
and water remembers homesick by its arroyos.
We too become bones and dry channels, eyes washed away.
White fossil swirls like limestone scoured to femurs, hands gravel,
the remembrance of water by rock, graceful, erosive,
severely delivered.
by Allan Peterson
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Deep in the Heart
The patient roses that stayed in the wood
for who knows how long
till someone came like a prince with a chisel
to let them out fully bloomed perfect
and from something not even rosewood at that
loop around my shoulders
on the high edge of the red Italian chair
like a great collar with a rim of fur
my two hands on garlands
We are becoming more patient together
They having become what they wanted
in full relief and beetle-free carved out
long ago from something not even wood
read under the yellow light of roses
from the filigree lamp like a dust of pollen
The book is Guide to the Flowers
How to be fertile at will
be run over by days and days with the weight of light
How to enter willingly the surface of the dinnerware
How to take up the bees with a gratefulness
How to be patient as if I was sitting down
deep in the heart of wood not yet a chair
awaiting a cool and informative knife
by Allan Peterson
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Speaking in Sulphur
Frances reopens her book and lives
take up where she left them
on both sides of the valley in her lap.
The life of the book is them under her,
under the pages, and whatever they say
about themselves they say in her voice,
and will wear what she sees for them.
What she says for herself is the voice
she never met, and last month people
she never knew in Oklahoma
said she had her grandmother’s voice.
As strange for her to be speaking in Sulphur,
as for them to hear that ghost voice
after fifty years. Lives behind her
have been reading through her life
and ours, not just in Oklahoma, but here
through an acre of air and invisible thousands
of recollections and swallow-building gnats.
These things must be rewritten and reread.
It is so hard to know who we are saying.
by Allan Peterson
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Hallowed and Behold
What? The sacred can be apprehended
with the feet? The earth retains a glory
of incidents impeded by shoes?
I thought hell and death were down there.
Though usually I feel through the face
that sort of thing. My eyes touch for me
moments of hallowed and behold.
I read the words “A Chinook rose up…”
and I pictured not wind but a salmon,
huge above the landscape, its glittery
jaws beginning to redden and hook out,
big as a mountain and gulping
because the air is thin and difficult to breathe.
This sort of thing strengthens my eyes.
Looking like drinking, the horses
whisper to the water, and whatever was said
just before I came down that morning was agreed.
The grasses nodded, trees also, tall plants
swaying assent, the water looking the other way
to clouds as if uninvolved.
And so I watch. I listen and I see
the night sky become unfastened from its lights,
see a rabbit condense out of dew. I seem to feel
trees deciding which fruits to throw down,
which to keep. And sure enough,
there is something under me. I close my eyes,
a specialness heats up my shoes.
by Allan Peterson
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qarrtsiluni 