A dinner fork hangs
over an empty
field near Chickering.
Sunlight fills the fork’s
luminescent parts.
Poplars vanish, part
of the scene. Ice hangs
from the giant fork.
Villages empty
into Chickering.
Under Chickering’s
lamps, late children part
thinking of empty
boulevards that hang
in the night. The fork
continues, the fork
is not Chickering’s
anything. Ice hangs
from its every part
over the empty.
Bees vanish, empty
expressions of fork
bearing fork to parts
of fork. Chickering
soft, collossal, hangs
somewhere near the fork,
apart, not the fork.
On Saturn’s coldest
moon, a vibraphone
emits human names
for the rings: dee cee
bee ay ef gee ee.
Orange Titan, the
inventor of cold
trembles. The thin cee
of the vibraphone
oscillates, naming
Titan and naming
Dione. dee ee
sings the vibraphone,
crazy moons. The cold
eyes of planets see
nothing: a great sea
surrounds motion. Names
are not. Even cold
is not every-
where, the vibraphone
not a vibraphone
but a kind of sea
monster whose many
motions determine
other motion. Cold
clings to Dione,
Titan, Thrym, Phoebe.
mercury, pupil
of tempests churns out
lumber and a red
wind and sand and red
rain singes the pill-
shaped core and without
a sky and without
clothing stumble red-
haired feral people
starving their eyes out
a golden
finch of no
particular
width far
past any
house springs from snow
laden bough
singing whar
to whit-whit in
assent the snow
shudders
Eric Weiskott is a young man studying English and Classics at Wesleyan University. His poems have appeared in Merge, Mudfish, Ostranenie, & others.
During his childhood the three steps to his porch were overgrown with yellow bamboo shoots; recently, his parents have expanded the porch into a sitting room, resulting in the death of the porch part of the bamboo.