Maurice Burford

[the] Robin’s Poem

1. Letter to Robin

This is the most important letter you will ever receive

and it is music that makes wind

Octavo / soft / covered in printed gray wraps

and his green moth at the provisional door

I still grow up like a moth / in a small desert community

the completeness of a wooden lot covered in a lion’s words

only little burning crystals of trash / and water-logged jowls

each crystal consists of a form / inside a moth

or really / pieces of moths / trapped

not even enough for neon / a ghost as a place to come home to

translated to / please strike the negative / Woolite was a good idea

and beat the shit out of this cross

the tubers have come dripping with moths / white and cold gray

I could be funny again / with spring and pollen and wings

and the page of a poem / in my beard

the trick naturally is not to search for a moth

a light-brown moth angled against a broken umbrella /

properly engaged in the center of a frame on the right flower

the wrong time of day /

the desire for the moth in the hands of a boy I will miss

or a memoir on black reeds / and there is meaning here

in the arms of a railroad / heaving across the word apocalyptic

2. Letter to Jack

I live here now and divide the night with electric vocabulary into myself and two men / Last

night we spilled the composition across the Charles River in a way to recall / Do you

remember how tall the planes looked /  Did I mention the industrial moth I saw / I was asking to

be made a man around the time / But then a flying doctor / But there is no sense of movement

like the tiny light of a gray moth / The material / my body / has changed from a shit highway to the

red water of thread / I can’t help but feel like that death musical moth in the window / Does it

become you to drip that white static from your mouth / I keep dreaming of that forest with the

dead flowers that light / where those moths we once liked come form / but an electric blanket

always drives me home / Jack / Do you sometimes taste your orange peel moth dust / Do you

cross that river and fall back about pillars / People don’t see rocks in moth time any longer / But

they do know the sound of endless falling / By endless I mean we all hit every time

3. Letter to Robert

how can the moth move against a green pane when I am gone

I imagine an open field as a dead place / an empty repetition over swans

on a morning of slow gray drizzle / in / moth going

away shouting / bell blast trumpet meadow

I put a torso and the wing of a dead moth on a panel / a mechanism of

solar moving / this here is defined as a field of dead moths

did we open the series which arched and bowed

how did the magic death moth appear and did it bring debris

does it catch the bottom and collect / not accounting for the blue edge

I saw a film on the structure of moth light

which is

dead moths / flowers / leaves / seeds / butter

fading / chips / unpollinated / surface

and engine /

called Reanimating the Dead or Faked Tree-Trunk

battered filming being pinned/glued all over the forest

it is something I have seen but forget

it is something which appears to be a depressed forest

it is hard not to see things / in the suburbs of a dirt mall or calling card spot

what a moth sees at birth / a cold empty toe’s worth of space

collecting up angles and reconstructing them by weight and spread of dust

I am unable to use the room now / it is probably just our habit / spreading

4. Letter to Robin II

I now know Moth Heaven is a slideshow of other heavens

and I have this scarcity / little motes escape and ravage where she lived

do you survive every night as if the moths were gone / becoming a

platform to the shore / I don’t wonder why I haven’t laid eggs

or closed a door / can the prettiest thing be paling and worn

but otherwise eating half a dozen eggs and soap is my nouveau vocation

they are crisp and blinding / made to blush and draped in modernism

Robert’s cream mouth / caked with leaves / schnapps / and traditional rustic bronze

I would like to put a hole where your brain churns

Maurice Burford lives and writes in a giant squid’s den in Ashland, Oregon. He has been published in NOÖ Journal, Cannot Exist, Pindeldyboz, and My Name is Mud, and co-author (w/ Jess Rowan) of the chapbook Prithee (Abraham Lincoln Press, 2009). In his leisure hours he cracks eggs and co-edits PinchPinchPress(pinchpinchpress.blogpot.com) and (occasionally) blogs

at pandapandapandaalex.blogspot.com.

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