the flowers
here it is & posthumous
the third darkness
with a very particular lyric lusterlessness
heavy with cloud & soundless
the impatience of fish or language.
what does this mean : having lived?
there are flowers in your head.
what is the likelihood of birds & birdlessness?
covered in weeks & grasses
the light parts
to see the dark part
pouring in
the ordinary ecstatic & pause.
words forget who you are.
posthumous here it is & caught
talking, like dreaming or waiting.
walking a cliff the dog jumped
collapsing, an aesthetics any edge
form is
a mood listening in
so big, believable sunsets.
all the lit things
drooping, the morning
runs out of a roar at the end
an irrelevancy of sky or wind.
half abstract, half concrete
things are not what you think.
no form feels free.
smiling, shaking, twisting, leaving
little clues behind the sediments read
the cant in the head strong & relentless, an edge-effect
of the fence, a face, the solid side of full-sun
& emptiness. illegible, exhausted & massive
signs say nothing?
tongues are strange.
the flowers clump a little gait & shun
watching the woods before hearing them
the calyxes. any event as its own analysis
while it does what it did. “reality as it is”
being an outdated metaphysics
if you have experienced bliss
how have you experienced this?
posthumous here it was & lush
a body backs into itself & sleeplessness
the song stuck. something hits.
sins are provisions, you eat them
full of some choking softness
or fish. form is a shape that shifts
so content.
who would you want to have held if you had?
errors are easy, are facts
redactive or diffractive? where are your feet?
the theory of art is a century.
“alice can send messages to bob
that he can receive as he falls.”
exit early & often.
one hundred metronomes go off
& hinge. emerging dispersing embracing
the side of the bed approaching from the forest
retreating again & again this
took time.
carrying the sun or the idea of someone
holding a goose, opening a coffin.
ideas are emotional in a physical sense
so aesthetics. it is futile to predict whether you survived it.
the zero degree of flowering—you are also a thing.
the hour of juncos, the towhees & squirrels
the hour of sparrows, the finches, the fifty wrens event the evening is
audible expanding bridge.
because things shimmer they leave language.
Julia Drescher
Julia Drescher has one full-length poetry collection, OPEN EPIC, from Delete Press, as well as chapbooks from above/ground press, New Lights Press, & Ypolita. Her work has also appeared inperiodicities, Entropy, Aufgabe, Luigi Ten Co. & others. She edited a selection of Beverly Dahlen’s essays & talks, SOMETHING/NOTHING, from Further Other Book Works which she runs with C.J. Martin. She lives in North Carolina.