#doomstead days

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"its body is too vast its mind boundless by definition the world is awake be careful my dears it is the gender that remembers everything" -Brian Teare

Good morning, internet! xoxo

[emilieideas]

Doomstead Days, Brian Teare (2019)

Reginald Shepherd (from Angel, Interrupted): “The day’s all description and what is he now?”

Clear Water Renga “the precise site the mind stops / its blameless languaging job” (8) “the mind / a Bishop pine splayed by mind” (19)

Headlands Quadrats “to run this distance / to metaphor / just jump” (24) “only sometimes / an idea lets itself // be seen singing / buzzy tea buzzy tea // to think I have to / walk around looking” (28) “chasing prey a kind / of looping beauty // off-kilter wobbling / like a saucer toward // stasis for an hour / I watch it not stop” (30) “maybe a mind sated / with image won’t move” (31) “faster than predators / on the trail I encounter // for the first time a coyote / exactly the color of July // in these hills unhurried / it turns to me full of bones” (33) “fit occasion to say / a litany of their names // dogtail foxtail / beard barley rye // a list of ships on which / the season sails home” (41)

Toxins Release Inventory (Essay on Man) “outside the Woodlands / Cemetery, the struck deer / a dark startle, white” (43) “paper dogs unleashed / in a field green as August / gets here, bull thistle” (44) “the notebook keeps it / alive, my first month out east / when I miss so much // the hills of Marin / Headlands my mind contrives lives / from paper, the twinned // images of doe / & dogs a crest I carry / out onto the streets // of my new city / as a kind of irony, / a bestiary // alienated / from actual animals” (44-45) “there are months I write / nothing while my life goes on / as historical // & ordinary / in its muteness as any / street full of cars parked” (48) “to fracture, to flakes / that lend dirt its signature / shimmer :: we walk hills // high above the creek / & startle a fox whose run / hurts the forest hush” (63) “I mean by marry / or world :: what is the feeling / that sends me walking // out of my childhood / into the pines behind it / until grass rises” (73) “inside :: even then / I can accept the violence / that arises from // being a mammal” (75) “except to walk on, / let my mind vanish into / movement, suffering // that won’t diminish / the fact that this form of life / is my best, hillside // below green & scarred” (79) “& eras ago / creatures swim & die & drift / to an ocean floor” (80)