Graham Foust
NIGHTINGALELESSNESS
Lack of nostalgia / felt as nostalgia—
once just a taste,
that’s now the daily mouth,
and mirrors are older than bread.
Near to a thought
that’s not yet cooled to truth—
that’s one way to live, or half of one,
but what’s its knowledge like?
Like touch? Like reading? Like sleep?
Why, in other words,
or in cubes of wet neon on dirt,
the one face?
And why’s the other unlooked upon, into, for?
Everyone who’s dead’s now “problematic”—
leave that out of this.
You’re where you write not fading into traffic.
But that rumor’s always attached to here
is absolutely capital—you hear
of a bird; you hear, in fact, a bird.
A few hours blocked the day,
and in the meantime, you got that way,
or this, and then rushed to curtail a view.
A little sunlight on
and then eventually through
your eyelids boots your body up,
and with that, at little last,
the spasm into what you’re going to do.
Come high bright noon
and come the corollary thorn,
you’re going to sit right down
and write yourself a flower you can sing when you’re sad
but you’ll be glad when you sing,
your songs instanced by the looks of things
now lost in some fire or fires
and so weightless as the best of spires,
a cumulus of what you hunt
and of how what you hunt haunts
and so hunts you back,
its ghost so many demoed amens.
Being—not staying—the course is the trouble;
places yet to be, opportunities to grieve,
a strangely damaging wind around
your city that serves, in a world young or lapsed,
as something like a budding grove’s inverse,
thus adding blame to bliss, you’ve stopped somewhere
but think pains to keep moving the aforesaid social hole along,
the poem or the song that never knows how dead,
dead or not, you are (or how gone)
and then makes its only sounds until it fades—
again
(like a worm in a church does)
again
again
again—
and then sticks out your blood.