from “Study for Swimming Hole”

Cover of the book titled 'Study for Swimming Hole' by Maxwell Gontarek, featuring a minimalist design with bold typography in black on a pale green background.
Maxwell Gontarek | Study for Swimming Hole | Community Mausoleum | July 2025 | 68 Pages

from THE DEPAYS

//
Lakelet folds
On the lateral or latent face
recon fades
wood and circle
Your arms
Taken on
Identifies the light
By its solid parallelis
m
A degree of mistrust which abstracts the magnification
“Trembling amounts” enunciated by skin
groundswell

The trope or tropic of reality lags
its tide of eyes
Advice occurs to
Like airspace
Scooped from the waters



//
Feral astral peripheral easel
The “vibratory encounter”
of precisely
Cecily’s

Brushes washed in a sibilant net

By attribute I mean everything



//
The collateral dimension of lake
Lift it up by the corner to forget it

Clauses of phosphorescence meet “furious and indifferent conjunctions”
In the motion or notion of history
A beautiful story told by its folds
Like some words clarity defeated
Winter came and went everywhere
with semblance
It represents a constant
A content of share in the lot’s dream
A lock is a hole



//
Swim the
Rim of thusly
Concave slake
Drought might
Near this
For far
Underlined lark
Their dark flakes
The era’s
categorical physiognomy

Blood covered much ground
White hydrogen a precious block out of which
A “pre” must be
hewn sheen

At areas of very close colors
Your recent but completed loss of experience
And the bottomless world is grand
“And that much more denied”



//
The tense we surface from
To stink up all spheres

The reed the world masses that raid but not to arrive
Context is a series of proximities which become objects
Figments on the trees
A wound inside their words
Ofs
in the background
implacably small

“There are mountain peaks and you can enter the fiery food”
“The trees are in motion and they sound confusingly like these”
“The time had come to cast things aside with a sweet end”
“The cedar fan gave air”

Is
moons months and money
and you did not say “art”
slow
The yellow which at dawn the lake seemed
culled measure



//
Prisms chords gasolines
Before their sky
Or exposed to its loss
Now then neither that instantly
Realism a schism
Of of wave
The night walks in its bag

Absolutely endogenous dap

The latest abandon matter can reduce itself to

The discrepancy “tell me
what time I shall be carried aboard”
Will we discover the residues of all possible dates
In images that vast depot
The soft ones often

Rise of a reverse progress of will
Explain ourselves

A leaf is an amplitude
“It takes the field
but we don't know if it will ever arrive”

Measure as all times
More final
June lying
Being rind
What’s told on you

Maxwell Gontarek

Maxwell Gontarek is the author of the chapbook H Is the Letter of the Door (above/ground press, 2025) and has writing out in mercury firs, Annulet, Works & Days, and elsewhere. With Léa Fougerolle, he runs the translation project verseant and lives between Philadelphia and France. Study for Swimming Hole is his first full-length collection.

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