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The Unclean Days 32–38




   

can take the nature by talking into it

roofline buzzard humps into sun

affective vision isn’t perfecting silence
each wing held as cascade

such version to which I hold tames me

come and symbolize me next  january releases
notion of pilgrimage into the fingers through
eyes focusing just above stovepipe  releases

into us both


            ^^^


inviolable screen  trap  owlet from her mouth

contrasts glass bell  doubt  in a physical sense

control of each other body  I don’t like pattern

substituting for wind for starters  to induce name

from chill and close it down  “we are simply

not prepared for these motions”  tell me again

what January means outside the houses’ sides


            ^^^


lead thought with finch
frozen at an instance
of tenderness exhumed
from morning in winter

lead thought with domination
fantasy

thinking otherness pales
in maple’s categorical limbs

lead with its markings’
mussed by investigatory
application of selves in weather


            ^^^


palm and lift part of her body away

modality death heaps on rosemary

frost-wilted  on evil magicked limbs

nuthatches reveal  white-crested  I’m

now segueing into releasing information

about the images with charitable eye


            ^^^


how does one project “it was just fictions
at first” with immediacy  onto the body

can you accept buzzard staggered
through scene  as if out of railroad tracks

and imagery as perjury


            ^^^


unlight in quartz bits


questionnaire
demands remembering

hip surgically lit

it all began


            ^^^


small tension on right side of her neck

a couple of  what I would call

restricted segments  your lyric

comes out as nouns of the place

as displacements against roof of mouth


            ^^^


see death in rosemary’s bend as purpose

as exhausted eye ejected from hawk’s flight


            ^^^


(Dedalus)

snow’s collaborative I

first she swallows his finger

first he invents mechanism
by which she realizes her desire

first the invention of containment
houses the minotaur

snow’s then a screen disrupting
depth and field of vision

first we must leave off metamorphosis

first melting filter and dividing hand

snow isn’t cropped out
but convinced out

first snow’s invented and housed
in their throats


            ^^^


section on new stasis

carved the phoenix’s feathers
carry stasis

we’re getting this progression
of neutralization  abduction  boredom

proclaim my body in chill wind
to frost-killed dahlias
and sun-creak from maples

esophageal swelling and gusts
my breath

workers accommodating fingers
and information and medicine

dying I’m doing raids divot
in mutable shoulder


            ^^^


throats through holly
mockingbird  architecture
radial  limbs  sub-limbs
barrel space against
white wing feathers

disrupted protein spirits
bird from sight into forward
facing thighs  disconnects
legs beneath me 


            ^^^


madness they use  which ghosts each snowflake

after I oppose body itself  what remains in the eye

sickness quicks touch  I’m thinking of Hercules

deep they say as a class  with sunlight backing their heads

skulls

can we move to a specific touch between humans

auroral break in the sense of taking just light from the air


            ^^^


two cardinals spiral into azalea

basing snow on memory radial I

wheels necessity now  preps

body for submission  simple

swallowing motion in face of wind

never has this eye been so clean







Lance Phillips was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1970. He grew up in many places. He attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for his BA in English and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop for his MFA in poetry. He has published four books of poetry, Corpus Socius, Cur aliquid vidi, These Indicium Tales, and Mimer with Ahsahta Press, and a fifth book of poetry, Devil-Fictions, is available from BlazeVox Books. His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Volt, FENCE, Colorado Review, Slope, Verse, Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, Bombay Gin, The Tiny, The Elephants, and Fourteen Hills. His work has been anthologized in The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing Anthology, Lenoir-Rhyne University’s tribute to Black Mountain College, Far From the Centers of Ambition anthology, and FENCE Magazine’s A Best Of Fence: The First Nine Years.