TREVOR CALVERT

M

M

M

With rain, asphalt’s scent punches hard. Out there, isolated, one crawls toward earthen clutch, swaying high grass too sharp for language. When I say “one” fold in to me. When you read “is” I mean “to leap.” Wind, implacable metaphor, insists against all, love, so we must keep close. O where may the untouchable rest? What place hope in this palace of the real? We’ve grown so swift even thrice-great Hermes cannot slip our velocity. Light peels image from thing, demands pixels from trees.
Our old magic is condensed to avarice,
bondage and longing, to a slavish gaze.

M

m

m

m

m

A city invoked
until we cannot leave
—urwilderness
denatured with glass glancing
the alphabet of trees has been
bombed, estranged, but one
cannot escape environment.
We leak complexity;
send me a letter and I
will reply with force.
Morning fronds
discovery: no truth
uncovered surrenders
rampant air. Once a story
is told, faces must bear
a portion of a forest.
Somewhere is heard
“let’s away—where we are
there are knives.”
I remain in smiling
lips, cottages, and murder-
ous women. It’s politics
of discovery that burn.
Stories decanted refuse
home, join bands.
O everywhere.

M

m

m

m

m

Better simply to cross that bridge when it explodes. Someday we’ll make it downtown, and it will be the downtown of our ancestors and we’ll finally get the chance to tongue each other up. Certainly we have been referred to as a “flurry,” a “smattering,” sometimes even the coarse “flock” but these are inaccurate. We can only be seen in conflagrations and rockslides and pounding drums and we’ll steal the holy bejesus from any who come between the deeds of our hands and/or the hopes of our hearts. Out lungs hurt every morning.

m

m

m

m

M

Amongst the wreckage two sisters
take their walks weeping for a brother
distant and lost at least to them.
Their wickedness is banal. “Boil,
boil, toil, and.” New houses, lawns
and strong tea in the afternoon.

The bees are a bit strung out–
confusing wasps for cousins;
“old rules are being broken,” was
one hive’s name. We have taken
too much, and now must flee.
The night is no longer what it was.

Ghosts are summoned somewhere
from a crossroads or cauldron or tea.
With them, hunger, dance, a sense
of history, possibly escape.
The forest was full even before,
and now how we wish we could find it.

“We’ll get there eventually, we always”
is uttered and wafted to spirits of small
sorrow, of striving. We wander what may
be roads, or maybe a trap. Some cry
complicity, others just laugh, but
music is one solace that cuts.

M

m

m

m

m

Once cursive led those in the forest and its curves mirrored their own. Celebrations were held wherein foxes and other “divers creaturs” leapt from unexpected mouths. Some as late as the 16th century attest this still occurs and shall do so in the future along certain meridians and in downtown studios. A history of books and a millennium have gone missing; certainly a forest was involved. Voices massacre numbers, so even lost academics hum vague idolatry. O loneliness!

M

m

m

m

m

Reading murders text
places a changeling secure
in serifed hooks
weighted against ink.
Thought, light, wind conspire
as lovers toward
genitive violence
of metaphor, immaculate
possession and breach
to materiality.

MM

m

m

m

Photo: Fenchurch

Trevor Calvert is the author of Rarer and More Wonderful (Scrambler Books 2008), and has been included in Bay Poetics (Faux Press 2007) and Involuntary Vision: After Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Avenue B 2003). He lives in California’s East Bay where he works as a librarian and does a lot of walking and reading. He keeps a sporadic blog at http://trevorcalvert.blogspot.com.

Contact: trevor dot kirk at gee mail