Chad Sweeney

 

 

 

From "An Architecture"

 

 

4

 

Though railroad tracks appear to meet

in the distance

 

they never do.

Hired mourners depart

 

to the wrong century.

Radio signals

 

bead along strands of smoke

over Appalachia

 

(where I feel tempted to report

the rivers are smoldering)

 

and glaciers in New York Harbor

redirect the lights

 

straight up into the haze.

Music reinforces the girders.

 

One must

 

rely on hypnosis,

a window

 

the color of wine

is what in death

 

terrifies.

The future protagonist

 

under development,

equidistant from his flaws,

 

imposes this plot on memory.

 

 

8    

 

I should have said

I meant to say  

 

the flock turns

in that carpenter leaning on the pole  

 

differently than

in you who read it—  

 

at the museum

we file by in ones      pulling  

 

each thing up by its naked

material—plucking it out  

 

into light      from the zero—

the sun  

 

shines for those who demand it      one  

 

scarab     one flint—edge

of the rail, the rail edge  

 

speaks

of an approaching train  

 

its circumstance

and something of the words  

 

shouted in dining cars
   

 

 

27

 

The meteor shower

inside the man

maintains his equili-

brium.

 

Chained to a tractor

he dragged away the surface

of the lake

complete with its reflection.

 

I painted

the stone's

portrait

directly on the window.

 

It wore a yellow bird.

It wore a fissure, a patch of light.

 

My brush was a chisel,

where the glass cracked

day leaked in,

elegant and famished.

 

Please, lie down with me, here.

Consider a hinge made of wind,

the syntax in a field of rye.

 

 

 

56    

 

Mystery of the grass—one

and many, to make a face of it,

eyes where shadows beat

in natural and random  

 

declivities  

 

the mud decides.

Grass as mirror  

 

                  for the growing

doubts in me, or  

 

loves, to make a face  

 

of shifting planes

                     the city is—  

 

of what changes and what

                                  remains—  

 

that quiver

               of instability

   in the molecule

           by which the world

marries itself               in the small.