Great Guns

By Farnoosh Fathi


Canarium Books
April 2013
978-0984947119


 

Great Guns

Who goes, asked the pore, there on one hand so beautiful? The modern
nets and fishes out contumely; there is palsy in the grass high on noon's
     shoulders.
The great guns of a lover—
his sweat broke into ants that led the other way.
One must lie down. Oh grand debt of the observer!
This unremarkable suffering and these annotations on the lily.
Yet even the water here grows, spoken of, so highly, so likely.

It comes rolling on an eye
to a foothill and it stops; its drops stretch taut— like
the guts of heavens devising
to suck the ivy of visitors from even the safest face, behind which
a lover peels and peels; as certain and as full as all beauty, its obese gold
     navels and
indelible shoes without escape.

 

Aubade

Like a totem of birds, every last one
understood
distinct, built with nearly identical
hands;

Hair blew into my mouth when I laughed:
an angle where briefly the gold
mimesis of inedible worms
was hid.

A rifle of Aristophanes,
a butt of Rilke,
the mane of Rintrah,
all kept under the drum pillow,
the bluff grass
while dribbling clouds
roll...

"This mirror deprives the face of love,
of one’s own"—

The earliness of the bird
that told me, in my red-faced
dynamism, a categorical
uprising
sun...

New mobilities, suit up in armor of birds—
stand and test:

"The shield of the heart is the heart"—

Beak—open and close,
open and close,
I count two points of an ungorgeable star—

 

Brazil

 

Left a hole on fire agony or was it the sun 
and love of both—
On the banks and near duets,
eagles with the white wine of the sun
clink and spill tall grass over head and heels
...Space of hell: shy, inscribed already 
But alone, I think I can be that 
again—a new hole in the flute
that doesn’t end.

In a leap, the country glows—to hone 
the fate that wonder exacts. So much 
passing through, so heavy
as paperweights angels land
square on chaparral nerves.
And in the most unlikely places: a tour 
of our breath with spider sails, a promise 
that a wish will purge
or pennies caravan
the safe return hearts cross.