Do you know the filmmaker who believed not in modern art
even as he filmed it,
believed not in psychoanalysis
as he inscribed himself on the fattest narratives,
as his films likely function as his own best shadow
of himself?
The moon mooning over him.
The moon with its man in it
as per usual over the pointed houses…
The moon in that way aspirant.
In the dark with its innumerable buzzing…
In our duplex by the power lines…
As somewhere a musical score
runs down the serendipity of everyday life…
As you put your finger to the flashlight
to make appearance of lewd shadows…
With the trees nevertheless on their whisper campaign…
When a correspondent sat bored at the kitchen table…
When a potted palm thrived all January in the south-facing window…
_________________
Or, when a little love sneaks up
and pinches from the passenger seat,
not really very seriously and not particularly meditatively,
not really in a classical way nor overly newfangled.
As in, one technique for handling persistence
is a constant recalculation of persistence.
One is whitewater rafting.
And strangely, sadly, I start to find things provincial and quaint
when I venture out from My New England
in this winter of broom snow
in the anyhoo philosophy of anything-ism
wherein belief is a mental trigger
that sublimates belief in concept
for belief in things
which is an ecclesiastical way of being.
I could praise a blender!
or a breakfast nook…
_________________
How we sat at the granite countertop…
If you love it so much why won’t you fuck it up?
Why not make abode in the one cascading blip
referenced generally in literature as the orgasm?
and the layer that layers the habitat
and drive your Subaru over that?
As again one brings Twisted Tea to the Pinot Noir party
and another finds a door painted only a smidgen earlier
and in this stage stand boldly naked
and smear oneself with moisture cream
and give all the carpeting over to the puppy!
When there was never more a foreigner than one’s own husband…
When was he sprawled more ever than on this braided rug?
Always the new and turns out we could bare to look at it,
the carbonite building blocks
not teaching anything not adding up,
the crocus not obliged
not in time to be plucked up
The guy we met saying, Take me to your quarterback.
As in, one occupation is to go up and look about
and another to lie down in a field
and a third to sniff around
and it’s companion compulsion to take a sip
in the orgasm referenced generally as literature…
_________________
Excuse me, but I laughed every time, recorded everything
my friends and I, never once stopping to consider
our own self-importance. Now look at us,
in flight from ourselves, hyped up on one over-salient response.
That life robbed of particulars. When you were threadbare.
When the radio did a birdcall imitation of you
especially for you. In the time of throwing important things out…
The time we painted two walls the really green green of baseball,
decided this was the phase of basking around in it
and they made an algorithm of our personal tastes.
(How a collector of cards
stems also from the archetype of the failed counter of them.)
And someone else to think how smart that was.
Someone else to smooth the hitches.
I can’t even get into how in love I was with my child.
What else might send one through such a dangerous loop of crying?
What else except maybe March Madness?
_________________
And the mountains turn blue again
on my Coors Light pint glass
in the fine variations of lower temperatures
when my neighbor nods to me
simply to say, “It’s cold, Neighbor.”
We had a mouse in the house…
Where’s my Cascadian Farm Organic Cereal that is USDA Organic?
As a thing that happens enough may cease to exist…
As one who misspells “positive” may for a moment
consider himself the invented superhero Positron–
and summarily learn easily to make lentils in the slow cooker.
Or, when a little love catches one
all mystical on the couch cushion…
To this thing and to that saying, You are not my lover…
When a little blasphemy carouses around…
When the blaspheme is myself
and disbelief the simultaneous
companion and container of me.
_________________
And the point guard knows the Zen of college basketball.
And table lamp how many shells piled within it.
I could praise a power wire!
Or a turn signal…
from my solace space on the three-season porch,
saying,
If art is saying a thing the weird way
then love is never shirking from it –
Jack Christian is the author of Family System, which won the 2012 Colorado Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared on the VERSE website and in Pangyrus.