Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

Heavy Pedestal

One blank page left
offers a moment to think
along these lines.
To fill the screen is not enough,
paper is the same speed
as writing, so everything
shares the same form of
hush and riot.

Upper branch flexes
to moonlight’s chin music,
in half truths’ silence
to the work that promises sleep,
but I’m in the middle, bound by a body
that trails the birds into this setting sun
from a marvel every bit
as visible as the arc of the stars.

To accept this fact, this fate
straddles the riddle between ambition
and brush strokes whose difference
is an evolving structure,
or your current personal truth.
Caught in snares or enveloped
in a perfume haze that disguises
reality to subordinate the inner life
to formal intention, to choose between
absolutes that are as hollow
as numbers or religion.

Each moment endures its retelling,
wider than the sky
and smaller than the morning
shadows on the sunlit wall.
Is it as precise as trees? Their slow
shapes known and repeated
to be memorized, memorialized.
A mountain in a shoebox. A sand castle in a rainstorm.
The many that are the grace of everything,
transformed in the memory of what purpose
assumed. Close to that distance
that says, there is more than meets the eye.
Each evocation is itself a shore,
a cascade of footsteps to the tune
of a multitude of wildflowers,
each with a unique scent. Infinite trajectory
in everlasting landscape, light pursued
to reinforce ardor and confound morning.
World that is motionless and could not be better.

As in memory, a question is a wish
or at least a verb. Absolute as a common source
of feeling, in excess to turn away
from these shadow the sky traces to the wall
to mirror my face. Both are inexhaustible
in their own way, a recurring background outlined
in October’s liver colors or an hour in a hammock
on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
Illusion seeking grace to confound the omission
which remains on its own terms
to confiscate the mind. Memory without end,
that dented structure outlines
the curve of the mind, as it lifts us
into a purity far from redemption, conforming
in its flaws, reduced to an embrace,
relative to the unthinkable,
a microcosm of perhaps, an illumination,
a moment’s command in the season’s cycle
intimate with the angles of the sun.
Its tiny ways are lived in hesitation
to inform unpaginated leaves. An eternity
made flesh, reflected in the accuracy of each
day. One by one a resistance
that cannot be denied.

Jess Mynes is a librarian and gardener and the author of several out of print books. His poems have appeared in: The Nation, The Brooklyn Rail, Blazing Stadium, Vlak, Shampoo, Big Bell, and other publications. He believes spitzenburgs are the best tasting apples.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx