Mark DuCharme

Blanks

                        after JC & LH

A pattern crashing,

Tune coming nearer

Mustering words in avenue’s swirl

Downward, where the eye won’t go.

They own the pattern, so they say

Downwind, lightly today

Like a handful of doves.

Think of Stevens with yesterday’s

Romance maintenance, etc.,

A novel way of falling to one side.

The nurse who at first told me I

Look young for my age, in fact mis-

identified me, taking me

To what turned out to be the wrong

Room. If at first you don’t,

Then do. Remain fickle as a puppy

As noon fades into afternoon then

Evening strikes it minor chords upon the

Sky. Soon we find ourselves whimpering at a quarry

Miles from the road into town. A rabbit skitters

Down the lawn. The impresario draws

A blank (how does one do that?), a kind of

Surface tension with gusto

& Extra sauce. The élan of the clan

Made the plan unlikely. Holding down windows

With a tune in the ear. Pages that the night has yet

To see snatch our attention, as women

Whisper of night & its frolics— the tune one carried

Far from that breach of the sea. Savor the whimsy

& Chortle, like an expectant houseguest. Day runners are coming

Bearing scripture, more text to decode, & an unmistakable

Sense of ennui,

As if the room slipped out of one. Vagrants & sandblasters

Will find this next passage particularly appealing. Joyful fatwas

 Groom the comparison. A double whammy. Sludge

For hard times. “This new collection bristles

With lunatic time warps, a sense of planet

Falling.” Tell the harbormaster when the moon does sway

Outside legitimate lines of inquiry. Festschrifts &

Bungalows. Trial balloons. Does poetry

Contain subliminal messages? Call it lurching

With the intended squeak, then slink back

& Dabble

Just for the thrill.

An Omen of Snow

Night yields its residue—

    Spoken, fractured—

Of bus passes & holidays

    Held down how long there?

A life in slips— it’s comical—

Broken nodes

A shattered whimsy

    Whenever whisked away—

When whisking

It disrupts one’s life like travel

    This having to get food & such

This having to observe

    A company of paper

A lightsocket, a messy ideal, guarded

Splay

Co(s)mic paralysis

    This feeling of ever going about

Fouled by disturbance papers

    Bloody puzzles

The tractor nearest the sun

    A song made of wounds

The Boats, The Seashells, & The Red Balloons

 The hurly-burly boats sailed quickly away,

Dragging their pennants like rough-&-tumble beekeepers

Down a knoll of winters teeming

With regret. Meanwhile, the emissaries

Lost their bailiwick & had to suffer

Impossible night guests

Who used up all their red balloons. Only later

Was it learned the electrician had been a spy for a distant

& Unseemly government. At night, the cicadas

Chirped peacefully at interstellar bodies

Though wayfarers grew none the wiser, & children got bored

Trying to assemble butterfly valves from seashells

& Glue. In the morning, they’ll go on speaking

Mystic tongues, while seafarers swoon & faint with zeal.

Music

 Poems are not riddles, but enactments, I insist.

No one listens! Dog is a vowel’s dead

Bird. The sun bears down

Upon my shoulders, raw & aromatic.

A new word is a new idea. Sound isn’t necessarily music

Until it is. Then people walk back & forth

Down the street. It takes more than words to make

A poem. We’re all victims

& Victimizers, equally; how else

To read history? Things pass, an urban hall of mirrors.

Last night I dreamed

Lines for poems now I can’t

Remember. Observe plastic; the fish is warm. Is anything unused?

The building manager’s complaint went spatial

With several bungalows missing.

Redact simpering, to carve out

A discourse. A man on street furtively

Scratches his crotch

When he doesn’t think anyone’s looking

As I gaze down from hotel window, typing. Wouldn’t you

Look at a monster, if it looked right back at you? Redundant soot;

A backdrop of letters. The private eye is not quite

Real. Loneliness is infinitesimal, a brocade

Starter kit, with whiff of sudden

Bells. To carve out a mystery,

Look the other way. He hides

Behind these walls, these

Scriptures. I can’t exist, myself, because I’m

Already primping for the camera. O holy guest,

O dead lost. Heaven is not elsewhere.

You have a lot of living

Left to give. & This is where night triggers

Music, not yet knowing

An operator on the heartbreak crew. Love’s not a puzzle,

A slow fade. If you flinch, I just might

Blurt. The forsaken posts were readymade.

I hear extrinsic, shaken

Epiphanies. Where’s that slice of moon? Disavowed

When the weather seems nervous. Poems

Are not music, but vowels’ dead birds.

Pretend that you can see.

Translation

                                            after Raworth

verse or version?

Great halls bathe the sea in evening

In the fatal provenance of all we know

We slip, we think, on shores wherein

To daub our presence with the filth of being

If you’re holy, let it go

By evening’s dark proximity

Let the sun flicker

In the night you won’t reveal

Where grievous angels haven’t read

& You thought about the rain

A cold, cold shimmer

Moot, like guided laughter

Emptied of impassioned glances

Whenever the tune goes on, or rain’s

Involved with any

Breach of sea

verse 2

Great halls bathe

The tea in evening

In the provenance of

Diamond know-how

When we slip out, unto shores of

Evening

& Our presences leach out the

Filth of know-how

If you’re holy, by evening’s dark

Proximity, let the sun, a pale

Blue window, becloud by

Dark becoming

When evening won’t approximate the rain

The sun doesn’t know how to mean

By sleep, & we involve others

As seasons learn to be

verse three & a half

The moon is dull as structure

When it grieves

Who are outsiders

At the start of everything

In what sense is the moon depraved

Apparently, on windy days

The autodidact meets you for tea

First line, worst lemon

Disaster flowers the eaves

coda: the verse problem

I don’t know, invent night’s speed

Sometimes, you hum trauma

Through adjacent means

Photographs are almost pictured

For those who know the words

When sooner’s not finer

Than a lake is now

Hunker down, then almost be

Of things, unremitting

You’ll never see

Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books.  That same year, his chapbook Scorpion Letters was released by Ethel.  Later this year, C22 Open Editions will publish his collection Thousands Blink Outside. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.