Excerpt for Unpublished Poems by Broc Rossell, available in its entirety at Smashwords

Unpublished Poems
© 2012 Broc Rossell

EBOOK ISBN-13: 978-1-936767-13-7

Published in The United States of America by: Brooklyn Arts Press, 154 N 9th St #1, Brooklyn, NY 11249
http://www.BrooklynArtsPress.com; info@brooklynartspress.com

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Cover art by Aaron Sing Fox. Book design by Joe Pan Millar.

FIRST EBOOK EDITION

for Lara

HOME
CONTENTS


Sans Maisonnée

Smoke

The Eroica, or, Even He Who Sought Refuge in Nobility Must Needs Recognized in a Torn Score that the Enemy Must Be Purged from His Very Sword

Grace

Summer Fires

A Cloud of Faithful Witnesses

My Body Became Eaves

Bereft of Counsel

Lac Virginis, or, La Nuit Faite De Briques

Helicopters

Putting Out the Conscience Like an Infinitesimal Cigarette

Each Sin is a Disappointment

Vestigial

Sunlight on Symbolic Logic

The Rain Seeds a Body and an Invisible Body

True Superstition is Ignorant Honesty & This is Beloved of God and Man

Conscription

The Side of the Page with Ink On It


Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author

SANS MAISONNÉE


The end of this poem
Is beyond me
And in this discursion
You have joined yourselves
To an old certainty:

We love each other.
Fruits swell on branches
Out of the white blossoms of your
Freckled countries

While bats flow
Into the bright failure of themselves,
Wings beating echoes
Of this poem’s lines
The tip of my tongue is tracing
On a winter windowpane.

In a new stanza
We are pared down
To the throat bone’s thrumming;
We’re in an octave people can’t sing.

SMOKE


Where have I gone
That I didn’t at the last turn
Against the idea of magnitude
Toward clouds instead

Implacable the horse bestirs
The bonnet
The bondsman
In his quiet moment
Behind the teller’s window
Opening into
Jim Harrison’s foxes

Onto the silent
Salt-lit days after the divorce
Onto the apricots
Onto elephants

Days that opened into windows,
Windows that opened
Upon the vistas
You posit behind each syllable

Each stone
In a creek bed
Circling the larger idea of land
Wizening grass-like aspirations

Into the ambition
Of utterance
Outlining the way
Scree runnels down to timber


Declaiming its silence
By standing
Each tree defying the sun
Knock it down
With my family
With my time alone

The moment I end is happening
It is the eternal
Voice that says “wait”
“Come any closer and you will leave your feet behind”

THE EROICA,
or, EVEN HE WHO SOUGHT REFUGE IN NOBILITY MUST NEEDS RECOGNIZED IN A TORN SCORE THAT THE ENEMY MUST BE PURGED FROM HIS VERY SWORD


Spinning in a drum

Sun low in the old window glass

Furtwängler defeating Hitler in Vienna 1952

What is the poetic context

Spinning in a drum

*

It is darker
The spider rising on legs long as bridges’ spans

I always seem to be able to keep a desk
Or a plank for a desk
Or forage in the alley for fruit

GRACE


you cannot escape these
dreams, even
if my broken
beaming brain

puddles
itself
under my body

my hands
are dry, your
hair still growing


SUMMER FIRES


Beyond the flaming pines
I stood selling melons
Perpendicular to everything I love
Each melon like a note from the Diabelli Variations
Into this smoking dark world

The sky still blue
I flowered above the smoke
My skull turned into paper
Fingers elongated El Greco

Lurch-sailing through a thorny crowd
And home with a truck bed of melons

The driveway at dusk is the real home the home sits next to

On each brown brick a mute brown bird
Struck and still like hammers on strings
As in the white air to every black branch
Art lost, and lost, and lost


A CLOUD OF FAITHFUL WITNESSES


Hope is a form of penance

Like an oil rig
Spouting as it bores,

I climb to discover the rock

Or the Virgin of Guadalupe visits
And labor assumes a purpose.

Romance purports a dialectic between loss and solace

But this clerestorial poem
Has no house

Admits no refuge
Denies anything I can remember

MY BODY BECAME EAVES


The fraught wants more
Wants it strict and square
Like harmony’s pinned note
All the wood is planed
All the cobwebs are empty cobwebs heavy with dust

Ferns cover this
But the trees have grown too tall
This has met the disfavor of the ferns
They swoled a promise, bad babies
They spin gray broadleaves out of that

I am strong not joyful
I run like a cup and a rabbit

Object, you can’t make me lonely

hylé

Somehow the water’s listing plane is an uniformity
Its single dimension its own alternation
Facets and ridges echoing shadows on the water
Puckered draws of water between an eel’s tail and its wake
Shallow shadow trimmed and animated
Shadows are formed and modified swiftly by bright surfaces

hylé

The calyx –

Not the wind
Which contains it

Its blossom

In something silent:
Hounds of joy, an open wide eye

In a blossom’s dead calm
Surrounding my slender body

A lancet of fire
That draws the pond dry

hylé

All like a saw
That bit like bells
Up into my flaring bright orbit

That unlocked desert, stripped and soft
Children endlessly born of chalk

hylé

You are only words
And you need the shore

I approve
No world for me

Not one best atom
No defense to think

I appeared between voices
I’m with less through this

You’re: laughing
And a drink

hylé

All you spent
Escapes if I write

A poem loses an idea
A weight
From me

hylé

Today was not winter

Fog

A black-and-white sailboat

Casts off from a small marina

Whiskey percolates

The boat sails

I become the poem

hylé

Again my body became eaves

Voices intentions plumes

They curled my words back into my face

Fingers tripping
Through my beard

Cypresses wilting windows and owls

Polyester pillowcases
Ambient sour light rising from the street

From the half-carved block
In shards against the ocean my city
Where things become each other more slowly

hylé

The most valuable part of company is humor
The honest confusion of facts spoken in a joyful spirit

If this could be stasis
I would marry my neighbors
I would plant trees and walk through the forests


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