5 January 2014

Juliet Patterson [rob mclennan's blog]

from Juliet Patterson's Truant Lover:

Opening of a Burr

The owls confined to hunting the freeway's median
suggest we're apt to turn unforgiving points
on ourselves. We skid past them,
the brain dropping letters in falling snow,
picking up speed, breaking into box-
elder. A mantle of snow covers all
of its branches. Mind wired: trunk, appetite,
bird. Each thing ending moves quickly
to the next, a neologism of "never" proving soul is not pathology
but nature & the globe of cranium mere instrument
for gutting fruit, teaching periphery.
What makes the body whittle infinite detail?
The right hand degrades the dress we wear,
dim in the fix of wing. In snow we see corrosively the shape made
by our lives; not the narrative, but this trembling inside
all living — fixed intervals moving space as it muscles
in steps & a cascade of waves below. Our car veers around the handshake,
carrying a wave inside us in the dark.
Little animal life & its habit of hovering,
a hand to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts
until death or irrelevance. A lip by accident. Nest saddled
in a tree. Then, one owl and rodent prey hexed, claimed
where the naked eye catches, thrust,
clinging to its physiology.