The Weather in Green, Second Evolution

After Mallarmé and before

Blue-white waves splash on the shore of a lake
stripped now of its beauty of trees.

Chugging chuffing coughing
iron blade up –
puffs of fragrant exhaust
whoof
along with the ghosts of not yet and far gone.

The memory of trees –
trees’ memories of agonizing caesarian birth – split
into boards and houses and shops
and the burning wooden towns of their age.
*

I am the intralocutor of ghosts –
to connect what is gone with what is going, what
has already become revenant in the future –

I am equipped to tell no one, not even you – ah,

as though anyone can demand of time
more than a fey wheeze of memory
to control our manic vibrations,
the dys-tonal counterpoint to the euphony of waves
*

too far from pointless succor,
only sky and stars and no metaphor,
learning the dimensions of sky,
learning the dimensions of water,
the choreography of splashing from one element

to the other,
the sad human dimension of failure,
the soaring dimension of again

and again
and again.
To pretend
*

to such control of my pen
I would have earned such vision
into what I write to allow words to be
as gentle with the image I try
to imagine of myself,
without which care words are no more
than spaces among falling leaves
*

but sometimes hard times, these times –
words like weather rise out of the ground
Poseidon green,
tumble toward us with pulses
of their own – manic volition,
leprous inner glow –

words like bruised air moving wounded,
cornered gasping in a return to
Carboniferous miasma
a new dimension for old evolution
another playful hazard:

jeter dés des …

jamais …. non! …

abolira toujours!

le hazard.

Richard Fenton Sederstrom was raised and lives in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and the North Woods of Minnesota. Sederstrom is the author of eight books of poetry, his latest book, The Dun Book, published by Jackpine Writers' Bloc, was released last fall. Read other articles by Richard Fenton.