JEFF DOWNEY

 

                                     



THE REST OF GENESIS (2)

 

 

A train hours into yellow

The going rate of lace    the laceration of going

Chattel   chaff-light place

A storm

Parting the row of trees

Part fence    part living thing

Osage-orange

A living fencing

Placed to placate

A fear of weather

To the north and west

Trees circling topsoil

Living wage    turned

Living wager

Soon as the thaw   sod household

Place clean with crickets

Even tuning

Even warming

Melancholy

In the chamber music

Osage-orange    said by bowyers

To be even better than yew

The posture

And attitude of grass

Children running back and forth between

Osage-orange    shelterbelt    wire

The vicarious can be worked at

Until worked out

A slender crack in the party-wall

Between two rooms    received when building

Place they first discover then make

Channel of speech

Mulberry white

Paler than boxwood

Indebted to nature    yes

But harnessing its vagaries

 

 

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THE REST OF GENESIS (6)

 

Sienna and starched cloth
An Atlantic

Which hits with rigmarole in waves like horses
Worked into cool sweat then blanketed

Solitaire-cut fields break into meadow
A moth decals on a flower

If we could see any better
Say in the moth’s ultraviolet

Would art still take effect
Would one still turn to it

A sled left at the end of its run
Finds summer work as a birdbath

Cemetery in shadow of rock
Cliff swallow nests like hammock bivies

Relief prevents the ink
From moving beyond the edge

Softer moment
Green coat

The sea’s unthinking is taller

 

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THE REST OF GENESIS (7)


Night is enough to hold against heat

Like engine paint

The astronomer undergoing

Fast and other

Halo-like phenomena

A ram    broad silvery real

Negotiating rimrock

The astronomer lights some husks

Down nearly to the ground

They go happily    fluttering in fantastic knots

New world monarchs

Troubling to stick    as cheeks and snow

A woman twice-widowed

And tired of burying her shorn hair

Invents braided bread

Summer / winter

Summer / winter

We are north enough

To begin a directive of again

Taiga priming

Moroccan tomato

This end was the blossom end

 

 

 

                                                                                                      

 

      

 

                                   

 

 


TYPO 19