The nubs of the gears lick one another,
a succession interlocking into
pure momentum, drive, and the world revolves
Around which runes will we trace our fingers?
Days of wheels, hours of patient waking
forgetfulness, of cruel un-mindfulness
betray the black energy that pulses
without discretion in the stern actions:
the sweeping of floors, the eating of foods,
the activations of sex projects, of reports
The big architecture is globular
Fragments flake off, revealing clouds and sky
and the forged splines of the architecture,
a matrix of rust, curvilinear,
intersecting beams, a skeleton globe
trapped in sky, heaving, circular, bowing
The architecture is circumferential
Beneath the fragments are assorted dirts
Beneath the stars are birds, nightwings in flight
White geometric planes waver and fold,
cultivating some semblance of time
What will we say after our earths have fallen?
Facing the globe has become expensive
and chancy; gossamer looks falling in
and out of earshot, the sonority
resurfaces as a marble façade,
a statement writ in fab-ulous!
angles,
leaving soundlessly a cold sweep of air,
a kiss of the weather, a single drop
of rain, alone, bound, and indeterminate
always, never to be again solved
Purchased and sold, invested and measured,
the stream of days forces remembrances
of hands folded in prayer, of the office,
of shorties in autumn, and of hooch
The night unfolds luminously,
a succession of light rays pushing out
to the outer boundaries of vision
A snake carves a book into sand and waits
Are we down for cataract surgery?
Time has a cracked face from which we’ve divined
glyphs, oxen, cross-hatchings, stars, lions’ heads
The start of time is necessitated
by the vacuum at the end of the world,
where the eagle and sun dance The Watusi
and from which we depart on the last day
The moon curves into a gray memory
The leaves have begun to turn reddish brown,
and filtering through our layers of skin
are millions of rolled eyeballs, crashing through
What have become of our stolen phrases?
A thousand nights atop the gold mountain
have led to absolute blindness, nearly
Anthony
Mariani has just completed his first work of long-form fiction, The
Bloomfield Diaries, a hybrid novel excerpted in Smallwork, Ben
Marcus’ literary magazine, and in No Record Press’ annual Red Anthology.
Anthony’s fiction and poetry have also appeared in Calamari Press’ literary
magazine, Sleepingfish, and in The Foliate Oak. A Columbia
University grad (J’98), Anthony makes his living as a journalist, whose arts criticism
and reportage have been published in The Village Voice, The Oxford
American, and Paste magazine, among other publications. He lives
with his lovely wife Dana in Fort Worth, where he is associate editor of Fort
Worth Weekly, one of the last remaining independently owned alt-weeklies in
the country.
