Timid as one who knows language, all of our tools
were ornamentals: inside the outpost, the need
of some places to build in preparation of wind, in others,
to gather it as any funnel was a spotlight; all the dates
came from averaging accounts historically, and though landing
was settlement the translations disagree if the long clear
day was a long white world; as a city without neighborhoods
or how the skeletal evidence suggests, a life-sized
painted fly in my cafe life, the sculpture absorbing most
is mirrorer and this name we thought was the country
is its vessel: nudes on the wall, in smoke; no matter
how coarse, the sugars dissolve; you don't need to
subvert the gallery but can solely for moments step outside.
The surface oddness was as coasting waves
displacing land forms meeting in seas,
the civilization appeared invisible because its stone
structures were national formations, my urge
toward take away, as if it were possible
to translate anything except the irredeemably
idiomatic; the lures were identical:
experiencing anything without you so odd
I doubt it, as one who needs to order first
the coffee then return to a counter for milk,
the pie, or knowing whether one pays
for water; a rancorous timidity was also masculine,
the seed's identity inspiring itself for passage
then planting, as though ancestry were traits
birds lift from the pavement but do not fly,
all of our treatments of thinking were behavioral,
directly proportional, nothing left but happiness.
Zach Savich is the author of Full Catastrophe Living, Annulments, and The Firestorm, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Open Competition. He divides his time between Belchertown, Massachusetts, and Holyoke, Massachusetts.