Goad credo. Whether quaver or
my larynx’s season
of wilt.
Our cleverness hard & unkind sinks
into your parable, he said.
I am disposed
straightway,
a continuous body resigned
to outward travel as
an artery arrayed
in edgrow.
*
Shaken twice self-
hooded, so
soon
the jewel’s smallest
arm hung up in a dark space.
Upright this irregular
frontier a little dinghy thrown
under the bay.
*
Lemon series. Dim-
spent dispatch
of pilots
crimped to the merry ship.
Refuted, by which
I was impelled & afraid nonetheless.
Having so long
delayed.
*
Mr. Cocking did not fall out of the wicker but
with the machine, the hole in the middle
had it not
collapsed his
parachute of cloud.
At length a theory a tarn of
plunder stirring devotional crosshatch.
a jam in wicker
trussed oblong.
Confinity exhausts the balloon
itself, our dew in the valve’s ensuing
number.
*
Preamble
the place where time was rope or
feeling mizened with yesterday’s
implicit rain, how
the slurry vertex
hardened nobody nightly.
Bulwark a gaunt sanity in
chrysanthemum the
instrument
tripping downward,
pooling—
a self
grown round.
*
His studded Byzantine
scrivening
the grime, sliding
into each other.
The architrave we,
twice devoured.
*
This is what celadon
deserves, this,
the rumor of
my favorite mother
on the subway narrative
dissolving—
an amorous detour sent further astream.
More sculptural.
More hole.
A pretext for one last meeting
indefinitely frilled along.
*
It’s hard living down the tempers without improvising
a grammar’s loose diplomacy
of sleep.
I was so inside the other sentence
once emerged from
the girding of
the breaking
up machine & miles of string.
Somehow this clarifies
my body’s axis within
a pulp.
Elaborately.
Rotting where we crept
back to the gouache.
*
Go back her.
The victim detail, a seahorse keepsake
sown with burrs in the wrong
manner.
Dreg song on the outside
of its own
hasty body on the outs as
the script
predicted.
*
Sooner run from the bargain we think to ourselves.
Alloyed whereabouts
unknown, pedant jetty jawing
its image, templo-
turrified in bloodhound
chalk.
*
A brisk formalism eats the lakes
out of iris. A bit dark.
A little blue-scribbled battle
with the conduit.
The trouble wasn’t
loneliness alone,
my secret emergency
mode enough coaxed back
from the begging
day.
*
Three red stars fossilize
in the schoolyard a rhodo-
dendron
insomnia tinting
the very sweet of pursuit.
We have no brick nor
garnish, daddy:
how we
address each other in
the liquefying room in the worsening snow-
globe’s incompliant
worry.
If timber’s easy kernel.
The huntsman vexed was also
stone defensively spoiling
the root-meat.
*
I shall cede, I cede.
The plague to the pippin,
some scalding theft staining the bristle
from the trough of a late
morning
tub.
*
The marrying whip-quote
cut from
your
water-hedge:
a school of realism descending
one last time—koi
koi
& anniversary flint for smoothing over
the deluge or whatever this mirror
warning answering
in fluke echo
was.
*
Selling the cypress
handles & privately, flabbergast,
what we dangled
over.
*
The absorption I’d always
wanted. Sparingly.
The coping
of his noddled head.
Trample lunge chant & forge
owl cabbage
where the door
kept ajar, tussie
mussie cosmos & easel
dwindle.
*
Monoliths in the midst winter
a spasm of fraying purpose.
The swimmer in love swims
under, removed from
the pain
scale for good
behavior.
*
Afloat in permission, silver mar
of sleep in its chain.
A suspension of
salts bored through cork.
*
Aisles of bronze in a wooden cloud & then
a settlement
of goldenrod spread far across these hills
turns gray.
Pestle thistle, a bruise in ormolu to soften lacquer.
Shell lac still the split-light twig.
*
He seemed to be describing
the very underpass.
Our clinkered bird’s
inharmonium.
The dockyard’s roving prayer &
knotted as a sailor’s
child.
*
The yarrow & tansy of it all.
Longer lawed the leaves
of azure meander
reciting burgundy
burgundy maroon.
To the miniature herd
astonishment pulled furrowing
from the well.
*
Should the last pressingness approach
with its autocrine of downcast
questions. Isinglass,
ego in escrow—where
my dune
hollowed friend
roughly
speaking countersigned—just think on the lull. Pocketed, the four of them.
Terribly, I loved them all.
—
Michael D. Snediker is the author of two books of poems, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry). He’s also the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Poems from his most recent poetry manuscript (a finalist for both the Test Site Poetry Series and Tupelo Press’s open reading period) have appeared in venues including Action, Spectacle, Blazing Stadium, House Mountain Review, Interim, and Prelude. He is the recipient of multiple residencies at Yaddo and the James Merrill House and is Professor of American Literature and Poetics at the University of Houston.