#john poch

[contremineur]

John Poch, Two rooms

from here

[95blink]

There’s time for only one full moon. You carry it.

February Flu, John Poch

[dk-thrive]

the trophies

...the trophies: a goldfinch tearing up a pink thistle, a magpie dipping her wing tips, in a white cloud, an ouzel barreling hip-high upstream with a warning. You wish you had a river. To make a river, it takes some mountains. Some rain to watershed. You wish you had a steady meadow and pink thistles bobbing at the border for your horizons, pale robins bouncing their good postures in the spruce shadows. ~ John Poch, from “The River” (Poetry, July / August 2009)

[contremineur]

On the high tin ceiling in the temporary room, if you are patient, you can see where the panels come together and, at the curved fleur-de-lys border, the overlapping edges strained by weather and time, the arbitrary network of cracks in the layers of paint just like the patterns of minuscule cracks up close in an old Flemish painting in a museum once you look past the still life at the very medium. Above the ceiling, you know there are wooden beams to which the tin is nailed. If you could see them, the pine would be crude, but you accept the purpose holding it all together and up, as a soul holds the body. This morning, in the next room, the two porn actors are not acting. They are making love the best they know. For a while she cries out a rhythm quietly while he is silent. Before they woke I heard five distinct birds outside in the eucalyptus understory, a garbage truck, a stirring, and then this flesh. I hate and love them and think I know the dark house they are headed for, the numb odour of old ink, the room of needles and no thread and no one finally watching, late understanding, but they don’t want my worry. They want to feel the black of space and sharp stars and answer to no one with a visceral art never done exactly this way, an art that you, the viewer, become lost in and take for an interim heaven, and look and look, art that is, in this counterfeit way, a kind of beauty.

John Poch, Two rooms (source unknown)

[clatteriing]

Dirty boulder of a ghost in high grass, you are the subtle turn from fire to smoke. Your face is even stacked like altar stones. Let this mountain be removed into the sea, and you lift and walk and toss the wavering plain that shudders with the weight of a strong and hated king, oblivious. The flies have brought their prayers   to your eyes, and you look away like yesterday, yesterday’s white eyes of the antelope nearly dead, dragged into nothing but the oblivion of a mouth and a self.

The Lion by John Poch

[allyourprettywords]

“The Death of My Friend,” John Poch

Your end was a lamp unto my path turned off. Apocryphal to the good, I tied the tourniquet of singing to my days—nights, the path of the moth

of a fallen question around the present, forget and call it prescient, making a grand talk of outspread flowers and owls: an empty net.

This prayer, it is like trying to throw a book into a tree. My courage is like most ribbon— for looks. Even into the soup I look

for a skinless easy mirror yielding skin of the divine. If faith is hope outside hours, then I'm a paperweight and where I've been

is an arrogance come to vanity—an empty tower. A small paste of pitiful salt edges my smile. Grimace of salt. Was I wrong about the power?

I must begin my dictionary of clocks in a while. Starting with the Acacia pace of a patient love. Between the owl and the flower lies I'll...

[sister-garden]

Month of the least death poetry, I pity you: a bone of a day once every four years tossed your way. You bury it. A fever coming on, a swoon and liquid filling up a spoon. There’s time for only one full moon. You carry it. The heart of you is candy hearts, symmetrical sans blood. Cruel arts, Pandora’s chocolate box with charts: You ferry it, seven by four, across the air in snowshoes, open it to share the blizzard of love’s polar bear. I marry it.

John Poch, “February Flu”

[allyourprettywords]

“Perspective on Might,” John Poch

Superior to the philosopher of God's absence, the avalanche is patient above those pines it might sublimely clean its teeth with. At the lip of the highest peak snow accumulates on a dead man's moustache like a dead man's moustache. Repetition isn't funny to the dead man who never made it to that bar in Champagne for champagne or to the avalanche whose time has almost come. We might consider how scale means to climb or to remove the scales from a dead creature with this precious, precise violence we call a knife. A philosopher needs a sharp knife to cut the cord of pride hanging her like a Christmas ornament from her parachute caught in the trees of the supernatural. After all, God is present as that last snowflake settling on the lip, the tickle which has come a long way to now. From afar it looks so soft. Even the knife.