Nor pause nor perch
Brandon Holmquest
Peach soda,
tacos,
a box of baby ducks,
Thursday, in other wirds.
Not just ducks, but many bords,
all of them
doomed,
even if they do get adopted.
Cracked,
I ca-
I cannot
keep the act from
happening,
then I forget which
act it is. They all
seem so
inevitable,
so wry, so
gone astray.
Wide whispers
fill the hall.
Shallow footsteps
recede to the
feedback
from two
broken guitars
broken by the
dripping rain.
There's nothing
I feel like collaging, I mean
isn't there
a single picture
without a famous person in it?
No, there isn't.
I'd like to
diff er en ti ate
myself
from the kind of logic
that leads to
cut roses
or the British monarchy,
but it isn't easy.
If you need to think of
negative capability
as a doctrine
then you haven't got any.
Which is fine. It's
not a virtue.
A Keats reference,
a handful of
illustrative metaphors,
and all the elm seeds
in the gutter
spin up
into
a cyclone.
I watch it
rise
and fall
while I
talk to you,
and what we
talk about
is the elm
seed cyclone
and how
I'm like a
mountain
of bricks,
dumped
in front
of what will
soon be
City Hall.
Remember all those
flooded flower boxes
and bocce courts
a few months back?
They're still flooded.
I'm starting to think they'll
always be flooded.
I like thin books
because I can carry
more of them
when I move among
the places I
habitually sit,
and I really mean it,
I think leaves
are underrated.
They sit there
all summer,
then go beautiful,
then they're
just like you, but then
Oh, there you are
and then you're back and I
am riding a bus to the
bus you're riding, board the
same train in different cities and
meet in the cafe car or
finally grow feathers
and fly because
when I eat
bread and salt it
tastes like your skin
and this is how I
know I'm home,
wherever that is.
Brandon Holmquest edits the poetry and criticism sections at Asymptote and writes poems and translates things, usually poems.
