Marsh Hawk Review

About    Past Issues   Current Issue    Marsh Hawk Press





 
                                                                      
Jon Curley

    
Seven Poems

Sculpt a skepticism and behold how it embeds
the weight of futility in its wake. Be vigilant
for varieties of non-indignant artifacts either
indigenously blessed or potentially produced.
Art-making is not the cure but a procedure
to yield faith-giving forms.

*

Blasted heaths and institutions, perverse those
universities given over to death-dealing instructions;
healing is not only a process or state but a destination
amid the lifeless landscapes, a thicket-ing/thickening
plot of relentless creation. A forcefield of content
set to bloom rather than shatter, to shelter, make
or mend better.

*

Law of the excluded middle: if the barren binary
is left to wither, translate the trans into a stance
with better semblance. For they who are many
are mostly you and I and We and They. Go
(re-) figure.

*

A special dispensation: civil discord is discarded
but only with the demise of the iron boot
and Right angle geometry that merges an image
of genocide with fasces-formed fraternity. Other-
wise, no truce with the furies, the fascists, or complicits.

*

Among the missed opportunities that were once my friends:
“solidarity,” “revelation,” & “transformation”:
I send this signal in both enlightened envelope
& light beam to you—which is to say ‘me,’
which was only ever us all anyhow.


*

The fragrance of fragments, the aroma of the ever-incomplete—
of these I seek in the wake of finished forms that finalized
the lifeless life that ever seemed the direst sign of retreat.

*

Ever supported by the ever departed, the endgame advocates
fantasized our extinctions and inserted infections into
our ears, minds, and wombs while calling it salvation.
The infection was their hatred and their liturgy became Law.