4 Poems by
John Amen
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Portraits of Anne, #3
Along the blooming street, I cultivate Anne's voice.
"You've never lost anything," she says,
"you couldn't live without."
She's right; it's not losing that frightens me.
The body, over time, becomes a furnace,
a sore jaw chawing love
into dark ribbons of smoke:
everything symbolized by a single smokestack;
the brain, the heart, assembly workers
toiling to the wound's whip.
The boulder becomes an amulet,
suffering the only uniform we wear well.
Still, the eye of the sun,
anchored in its blue skull,
peers dutifully from periphery to periphery.
"It's not human to walk downwind," Anne says.
She sows rage and reaps wisdom, contravening
law, digesting glass with impunity.
I'm attempting to do as little as possible
and, thereby, accomplish much.
Portraits of Anne, #7
All my efforts and laziness
have little to do
with my boons and debacles.
Through immense concentration
and gross negligence,
trifles are gained and lost.
The rest, up to the wind.
"I want simplicity," Anne announces.
She tried and was marginally happy,
cooking, making love before sleep
to the man for whom she cooked.
A fire sputtered, though,
at the base of the white fence;
a volcano rumbled beneath the picnic basket.
It was never enough for her to no longer want.
The sky is venting,
there can never be enough rain
to unearth what we have buried.
What we avoid continues to define us.
Anne won't admit it,
but she wants to believe
churches are made of blood,
a time will come when
she'll outgrow herself.
Portraits of Anne, #12
Anne filled out forms for the worst part of the morning,
trembled behind the spear toward Brevard.
There's been a landslide, Hogback's tantrum,
for all the pacing of the moon.
I've courted ghosts for a year now,
flirted with triggers, romanced the corkscrew,
lanced ulcers to find a unicorn.
"Difference is maya," Anne mumbles into the phone.
"The sun is an only child's fantasy,
self an imaginary companion."
At night, my footsteps whisper
in the deaf ear of the mute sidewalk,
telling it of places it will never see.
Anne has a fever.
"The wheeze," she says, "is creation's soundtrack."
The fire she spits is nothing
compared to the one she swallows.
Portraits of Anne, #17
The sun appears, a full stop
in an improvisational passage.
Like a jaded editor, Anne steps to the porch,
peruses the storm's dithyrambic work:
Each moment, volunteering its testimony,
interrupted by its successor's eagerness:
the palimpsest of superimpositions;
motion inseparable from stillness;
everything alphabetic signifying babel.
Anne will watch the earth
revise itself into the same green epic
she has read so many times;
every stalk and sprout,
climaxing in hackneyed mulch,
foreshadowing a predictable denouement.
"Nature," Anne whispers into the phone,
"is a writer way past its prime."
She clutches her agnosticism as if it were a cross.
Maybe she's right, that sterility is the true fountainhead,
winter the only muse worth having.
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