Friday, September 7, 2012

Outcroppings by Jonathan Brannen



 time is transparent




                        as though I were an empty street
                        or an empty sheet of speechless paper


                                                arrested by scenery



                        as the plane takes off
                        subdivisions look
                        like crop circles below



distance


            this dance
            of dislocation


                                    there is a sequel
                                    to these events
                                   


odd numbers
silent letters
the local sense
of things




                                                two images
                                                blocks in space




                        achieving
                        nothing





to distinguish between margins and boundaries



                                                no longer sleep
                                                just inertia





to protect actual truths as much as lost opportunities sometimes it is neces­sary to forget the dif­ference between the possible and the possibilities




the unpainted pier
on the distant shoreline
the smell of rain
moving in

a steady light now
scattered in time
another moment
for reflection









the shiny surface
                        of direct objects
                                                the fiction of history








what eyes conceal





            of voices that will not be denied
                        of choices despite history
of lives that have
taken place





every representation
is a distortion


a change of tone
built up in absence
of speech







                                    what space is for
                                    for what space is
                                    for space is what
                                    what space is for






vanishing on waking
images hard to retain




                                    to construct a refuge
                                    of incongruity


                                    an artifact constructed
                                    from fictions of youth
                                           summer and salary








time is solid




                 rain hangs
                 in the air




                                    everything that is
                                    is as blind as the rain






_______________________

See Brannen in AlteredScale.com 1 and AlteredScale.com 2.


Jonathan Brannen is the author of twelve volumes of poetry and five books of visual literature. His most recent collections are this is visual poetry (this is visual poetry chapbooks, Kingston PA, 2010), a sequence of full color word art,Mona Lisa (Avantacular Press, 2010), a sequence of visual poems he created combining computer constructed images and photocopying between 1975 and 1982, and Deaccessioned Landscapes, a collection of technically innovative sonnets (Chax Press, Tucson, AZ, 2005). His poetry and fiction have been anthologized in five countries on three continents and translated into two languages. He grew up in Florida and currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.


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