Furthermore, a Wardrobe

Odd to call pollen the filth of the lily,
but the shirt was white and now florally

ruined. They say clip the pistils to prolong
the blooming, and the wearer might say

clip the pistils to avoid further grooming,
but this one's not that clever, not that quick,

and gives more care to his apparel than
the fun he could have without it. What fun

is debatable, subject to taste, but here's some:
let's think back to the beginning of the lily

and sit aside the seed, or lie among the bulbs
that allow us to think they light up our dark

and make our plot a loam-lamp, shadeless,
where we practice patience, listening to cat traffic

above, learning to teach ourselves sleep
from the lidless, so when a night of false stars

comes to harm us, we will be wakeless, caked
in our focus so that nothing can delude us

into rising before the winter has so diminished
frost is no longer a thought, and to recall

the nival miles of a drive through the plains
will be to flex one's head to its furthest tense,

and we realize that filth is situational, like its
converse, though both also exceed their situations

into absolutes, and the mind will love a stain
when it begets investigation, for by now the shirt

has been cleaned and worn again, like lily begin,
lily bloom, lily bend, and a wearer describes the distance

between bees and the dripped honey on his cuff.
















Red Upon Inspection

Sweet potato smoke and coal, collage in the nostril
in the city of the thin men, we were here for a while,
interim business in the query of where to belong,
whether to give what branches, dust and glass more
than a chance, a gamble for our attitudes which want
a changing, a new station without the static of the last
and the snow of the worst winter ever broken over us
like shards of our calling gathered unforeseen
then scattered back not to us but to us and others.
Directions were botched in the crosswalk. People fell.
We had an address there, letters and salutations from
coat factories sounding out some strange contemporary
benevolence. I was troubled by the request.
More so the image of storerooms, navy forms of torsos
hanging in a row of nothing warm. I want a habitat
the way a tail has a dog, the business of mostly invisible
attachment and balance, sometimes clipped for beauty
as hedges are, as sentences are, as hair is, as are
trees for a love of form and function, force the blossom
outwards to the orchards and their inherent hands.
Who will end the battalions of chatter we cannot stop
from coming out for and against candidates, river-village,
lobster-harbor, twig-city of decisions on skin and conviction
that environment matters as an actor upon us, idea
that we're on the sill of things until we acquire the vantage
of glass, we were glass a while, a quarter look to the canyon
revealing earth enough for further red to be revealed upon
inspection, so we did and were red from the stone.
















Black Anecdote

In the sequence of the night, second
was consulting the dictionary in the dark,

print stacked upon pages deep enough
to encourage endless digression and erase

the original query. First was the cast
of constellations shifting myths across the sky,

its arch blued and broken by the short light
of satellites, their course so quick and linear

as to seem residual. Among our tangents
was the consideration of an illustrated quiver,

the arrows it held, and the positing of string
linking everything we said, so a conversation

could be traced to its source, its re-directions
recorded. In the hours of alarm,

we found no conclusion that was foregone,
and nothing that hadn't been before the night.












Andrew Seguin is a poet and photographer. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Western Humanities Review, LIT, CROWD, and Boston Review.






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