Cedar Sigo
Directional Field with Columns
All trees
are trees
of knowledge
depending on
where they hang
momentarily
upon
a light
system.
*
How does the wardrobe change within the scheme of a paragraph? Does poetry ever wish to ride a line of prose in hopes of revealing more? Do we wish to be dissonant yet confined to a room of four corners? Is it an assignment we give ourselves to check the quality of images? They leap from my mind when doubled over. Thankfully the prose poem has been used to countless (warring) formal ends and so remains a pulsating phantom container.
*
That's the problem with doors
they force my hand
and never swing broadly enough
for the lazy second half of my mind.
The details that I keep encoded,
they get rearranged but never spoken about thoroughly.
Vocalization is over, highly wrought opinions get shot down.
Let them topple over
until they recognize my silhouette among the ruins.
Occasional tulips and blown out confetti, industrial songs,
let the body coil gently along the empty shore.
*
“I still don't know what a prose poem is, but it creates worlds.”
The roots
wet with permission
form a staggered crown.
“Just write what’s going on around you, outside and inside.”
“It's a conceptual universe that involves a certain number of words.”
How they jostle for three seconds on the degraded lava. It's a faded, star reliant system almost washed away by mass adoration. The doubled screens absorb a lot of astral blowback. It's a voice cutting in from the side and finding its measure in spillage. How do I accidentally make clear my other worldly derangements, they may prove useful, widening the trail with red, reflective tile. A series of fountains lie in state, whistling bottle rockets disregard their own report.
12-4-23
Reliquary in the Shape of a Key
for John Bosworth
It was the flutter of ultimate arrangement
betrayed in a nervous hand.
The upper limit skies
their peeling apart,
we must afford ourselves the nude body
if nothing else.
I mismatched edges and admired when I couldn't.
I heard a knot of wood, a snap as in the ark of a stove fire
left asleep in the back
seat steel of a Plymouth
let the stars off early
soon as I
get them flicked
back on
we trampled the late fall
as through a snake pit
staircase left
to waver
the grille marks
faint
fields of white rock
held loose
at the heels of dusk
The first time they reappear
we’ve forgotten all about them.
Treacherous mornings
take on the weight
of missteps (in series?)
canned explosions
set off the most awkward age.
A county square now tilted
uncrossed, awash with daydreams.
A rondelle served in kind
as a slap can be.
The spike of a line driven
across
into battle.
A flag of grand mishearing.
Jupiter bright
rushes left,
a black sky is kept warm
strangled of its few stars
sewn on red,
ochre, yellow and white.
The Last Nights At the door he suggested that I look in through the window. For several days the rain continued to fall. Paris covered itself in a veil. He seemed to be addressing his remarks to an orange couch but his gestures made it clear that he followed the secret voice of diversion, one of those poets chosen through chance. There were months during which he lived under one certain sign, (that of being followed). I didn't know him yet and that nothing bothered him. After my conversation with the most wasted of assassins it seemed easy to breathe in the alcohol of the open air. A lush garden drawn through the light of a man's eyes. I had no fear of forgetting. I dreaded the oncoming boredom of the unknown. Night succeeding daylight, digging its own pit. I was determined not to lose track of this phantom, more than anything else I hid from him, under a river of quiet, under a cloud of time lost. I answered his smile without thinking as one might answer the mirror.
Unpursued Darkness
for Frank Haines
The gallery door had been pulled shut so I had to see everything through a bank of clear glass. I could practically hear the tinkling of Liberace's piano (on record) cutting across recently frozen, now huddled voices. This was only a photograph but how could I not fall back onto memory's lame sounding board? Toward 2002 Bay Area Now at Yerba Buena Center. The place was your usual two-part clearing house with intimate track lighting. Is that why your cut felt creatures and landscapes seemed such a welcome, glowing, interior option? And now this new 'large glass' allows a similar passage. The beckoning and echo that only a brilliance of scale can set off. An alternating siren... Is this because the applied soundtrack now threatens to bury the towering form? Is this because the upturned key is finally shown with all its ingrained glory pouring forth?
Cedar Sigo is a poet and member of the Suquamish Nation. His most recent books are Saint of the Abyss from Spiral Editions and Occasional Objects, a book of collaborations written with Simon Wolf. He lives in Lofall, Washington.