Raymond Farr

After We’ve Eaten Our Fill of Everything

Just yesterday I saw
Gasoline flowing from my flowers into blogs

& as I was reading The Lice by W. S. Merwin
A beam of light came up over the basketball courts

I was quietly drowning in the parlor
I could feel the glass paranoia of some trees I’d planted

& I realized that the writing always comes from
The faith we have in it—from the wreckage we make

Of a complicated system
But there are no signs of life here

Just the shimmer of a car or two passing slowly
& a voice calling out to us from the old xenophobic staircase

& though we’re just sitting here looking up
Movie times on our laptops

There is the metallic feel of snow in the air
When no clouds appear in the sky

& so winter breathes its sentences for us
& the stairs lead down & out to the beer garden in summer

& to the nightingales of memory
& to the neon mosquitoes throwing tantrums on the sidewalk

& this whip of wind keeps shrieking
Like mom throwing dirt on our graves

& death is a sink stacked high with dirty dishes
After we’ve eaten our fill of everything

Realism Is in Bloom!

1: Ah, Film!

& because life is big but not grandiose
It gets edited out & then put back in

& because the black rubber penis Tanya bought Eva
Is only a crazy gag gift—It’s so big!

& because it turns up missing from the gift table later
& we all go searching—following the psychic vibration

In our hearts & because the ghost of Tanya’s last hetero fuck—
A poet named Wu—pulls up late in a rickshaw & because our laughter

Is ramshackle It’s poetry, says Eva & so everything is improvised—
A film shot on a cell phone & because the mystery is never solved

& History is a lot like life & the facts are a lot like
Our own lives in particular & because a legacy of facts

Tramples the empty pages of an early white snow tonight
& because the sky is still falling like a stunt man

Thru the stain glass candy of the skylight in the parlor
& because everything’s to scale but this one azure chair

& because whatever it is our notice apprehends
Blends with the background & because to fool is human

To care divine—we stand on our heads
& look nothing like ourselves after 2 am

2: The Silence of a Car Parked on the Street

Winter exists in the cage of some formidable white noise—truth
& white paint & the silence of a white car parked on the street

& people shooting video on their cell phones of snow accumulating at dusk
& like pretty girls that lie down in their sleep of delicate white dresses

Everything the camera loves is art & everything it shoots it loves
& because the scene just ends in John Lowther’s rickshaw toting Mr. Wu

& because the cosmic splash of the moon (which is the universe)
Is anything but a flash of something moving & meaningful—a first kiss

& because we doubt its existence while giving it the romance of a name
The long pause of the viewer takes it all in—it leaves its mark on us

Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), sic transit—“g” (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012, 2016), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015), Angst of the Large Transparent Man (Blue & Yellow Dog 2017), and more recently, A Deep & Abiding Frequency (Blue & Yellow Dog 2017). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, and The Helios Mss.

This entry was posted in Poetry and tagged , by Posit Editor. Bookmark the permalink.

About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.