R^ichard M^eier

Fortune

Walked out into the light clouds

hanging down in the east like vines

having first climbed up it was a shaking

off of paralysis who’d you get that off

for me I said a miracle meaning the will outside

the body when I went to drag you

out there too you were walking like a Warhol mylar

cloud springing springing green hood

past the barn you knew all along you were going

to see it. The child’s uninterest didn’t make us suspicious

of him all silhouettes are ancient on a ridgeline in the orchard.

The white dog is black and chases long sticks flying

a line crossing out the huge word West

before it joined in darkening the flash of light-

in-opened-mouth. Having taken out all the concrete particulars and left

an abstraction that walks around a body known so

well you can’t help or picture it a cure for description

now heard to be an echo like the crime of fortune

telling everything that happened leading up to the stranger

who got you thinking it was there

among the vertiginous sure companion thought to light.








Train Seen From The Seashore

One lie is not as good as another.

He dropped those particular berries. The modern flotsam

(the other in the bamboo boat’s gone missing)

is plastic, ball, bleach bottle, woman’s sandal, net,

termagant, accident, you-name-it,

tied together with string to make a mooring

marker or a haply child, as walking along the shore

I never left it, or those years making fortune,

the three-year, five-year, two-syllable,

the rule being each the same as preceding,

for the world called us, ease of utterance, to each other,

attraction/repulsion, the toy trains the shuddering blast

the diesel-engined one from the tunnel mimicked

to great marvelous and residual excitement.

I have given up all my addictions.

As the after-products, we clung to the edge, the plage,

like letters on burlap worlds, bran leaking,

or autographs made grass stains between past

and someday next when we’ll conspire, cold,

in the hot, unquiet ground once said to chasm

a lime-pit that emerged from us, now recombined,

though not like what we’d like to shame, an eternal,

happy ghost of more expressive features,

indefinite, lyric game we played endlessly.

[step back to issue 3]