Arthur - Charms Against Lightning

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Note to the Reader Copper Canyon Press encourages you to calibrate your settings by using the line of characters below, which optimizes the line length and character size: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Pellentesque euismo Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so that the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. When this text appears on one line on your device, the resulting settings will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the page and the line length intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accommodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems will be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent. Thank you.

We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.for Shannon

I

Charms Against Lightning

Against meningitis and poisoned milk, flash floods and heartwreck, against daydreams Against losing your fingers, drinking detergent, earthquakes, baldness, divorce, against falling in love with a child Against lupus and lawsuits, lying stranded between nations, against secrets and frostbite, the burring of trains that never arrive Against songlessness, your mothers depression, the death of the cedars, Siberian crane Against these talismans against lightning the shutters swing, and clack their yellow teeth; the deep sky welters and the windows quiver

The Kitchen Weeps Onion

The kitchen weeps onion because the cook is dead. Pans strike chorus and the ladles keep a knock-kneed stride. Chives,chives, and chives. Everyone seems so tired but the diners cant sleep. Chives,chives, and chives. Everyone seems so tired but the diners cant sleep.

The kitchen tonight weeps onion, so everyone else must weep. Whats the use in talking? Lets touch, and turn apart. The cook is quiet, cold, unearthly, and the turnip breaks its heart.

Ghost Life

November. My shadow steps outside, a knit scarf double-wrapped around his throat, wearing his feel-good canvas coat, a hand-me-down with frayed cuffs and an ink splotch where a pen burst in a side pocket years ago, on a colder day. A Safeway bag blows willy-nilly across a puddleful of bricks and treetops are raucous clown wigs and daubs of oil paint.

My shadow feels my company, my stepping as he steps, feels, although he knows it cant be true, that the fall and all its wreckage were invented just for him. Nameless as a waterdrop, he walks sideways up a wall, and is taller with every step and thinner than a flame.

Utopia

Now hes found his own city, a postcard place that anyone would like, backlit by the romance of an unknown history. Here, sheets and hair perfume the air, every gate is hammered silver, every song, a song and dance, and the balloon seller bares her ivory shoulder for a kiss. The man, whos spent enormously to feed a fantasy of being from no placespent what he had, and borrowed morenow is completely happy except for an idea of an idea, which he cannot outpace, that somehow he may have missed something that he should not have missed, though no doubt this is better than lying on a cold suburban beach admiring stars so far away, hed be seeing them as they were before the dawn of human speech.

Drying Out

Every sharp distinction cut.

Drying Out

Every sharp distinction cut.

Id ride around on the bus. I saw a fire truck in fallen flowers. So much mass under so much nothing. I was rattled by the sign, ELECTRIC MOTORS & ARMATURES REWOUND. Id walk a mile out of my way to not cross a bridge, wearing wool gloves on summer days. When touch-me-nots waved, I felt sick.

I was cold in a madronas shadow, shocked by the wetness of a leaf. A shouting in the brain, awake, asleep I saw a lawn chair reclining in the sun and had to shield my eyes.

Drinking Song

She and her hat came over She crossed her legs in the sun her sheer hands in the gloves they love they wear She came over, smelling of wine nothing of hers being yours to accept or decline , she said and a ship groaned in the boatyards to the west, heard by a backhoe its jaw to the ground and it couldnt dig its own grave She was all switchgrass and began to sway, and , she said and on came the pollen engine, the injury machine, tocking double-time between every tick Nothing of hers being yours to accept or decline she came over her purse full of codeine, and cigarettes, and twine

Vertigo

A white sail turns near Honorat where monks murmur to their beads, and tour boats land and leave like prying bees since bees too turn orbits where they go, spying into flower after flower, flying their dizzy, hectic chores, making pollen move. A white sail turns near Honorat and the common gull glides by. A white sail yaws and forever-going zephyrs confide in the trees they shake. Waves of every size are spat up by the sea.

How should it feel to be free? Standing in the surf below a millstone sky, she wants to know what moves, what is moved, by what immense machinery

In Praise of Noise

The sound begins with a furnace clicking awake in a two-room house, answered by a few, then more, voices: gauges, and old-fashioned watches ticking out of sync, in growing number, so their tip-tip-tip fattens to a moan, joined by a horns upbeat honkity-honk, then ringtones and speakers rehearsing drawn horsehair, air in a woodwind, or mimicking a hand slapping a polyester drumhead, but unlike these coarser frictions, playing the same, every time. A car door bangs, a jackhammer hammers, and a bassline purrs through a wall. The sound congeals, sucking in more, a mechanical syrup in an IV drip, the automatic ruckus of a robotic ocean, a symphony no one wrote, confounding every pattern: teach me the song that no one can sing, someday to be the song of everything.

At Klipsan Beach

The sea marks time like a sundials arm, steadily extending its reach. Crawling back, it vomits on the beach jellyfish as violet as violets. My whiskey, a soft amber, floating ice.

We are, and then we arent; thats the mortal art. I stood dying at the oceans side to dream up only this. What could I do but make my shape? I stake my shadow to this place.

The Death of the Painter

At the end of his life he had money and attention, and certain towns were known in connection to his name. He was fastidious, and wore a tie, was photographed with brushes, with a bird. Under the subtropical sky he forgave the things long done.

He hardly saw his children, by habit was self-absorbed. His atelier was sacrosanct, with the ocean for a view. When he painted, it was descent and descent and descent from the cross, and when he died the sepulcher was simple. His late-life love wept from another room.

Vertigo

beneath the sleeve the clock face mooning the un rewinding arms twelve points twelve equal though unequal-seeming hours the short hands cycle equal to half the earths own diurnal reversal as if stars were gestures as if by navigation as if a message other than the eye finding itself o i miss you

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