Ed Skoog is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Run the Red Lights (Copper Canyon Press, 2016). These poems are from his forthcoming book, Travelers Leaving for the City.
where I
like to sit is at the counter
listen to the kitchen gossip
like train
whistles reading their teleprompters
the cook’s politics
the riverside track’s
straightness
what funds may become
available for the dobro’s widening slide
the lettercarrier punctuates across the street
he knows the door codes
twelve miles
a day he walks out of moments
rejects
as much
as he brings
And they sing: I had a plan to run away
after kindergarten
kept a green pack with selected toys
flashlight
a change of shoes
only when
I
asked if I could run away they said no
so put each object back where it brought
the house joy
when it doesn’t matter
some people are called lost
but nobody’s
going very far
not with this gravity
not at these prices
the fig tree is a strangler
cormorants in vile arrangements
stagger the fallen dam
I was a child I go around the houses calling out
names they respond with various stratagems
they sing our masks slip and in the yard sale
everyone’s a stranger
to get through
the day with your button you may
need to forget what’s disappearing and be like those among us who hear
do your best to ignore what
even now is fading
what falls
outside of your shirtsleeves
I’m talking
to you
grandfather
for the first time and it is so quiet in this nonce space
you can hear me
as hummingbird hears honey
I don’t think I can help you
up from the hallway floor with song
the impression that reading about you has given me
like thought arisen
while reading a travel book
vivid spires and dusk-lengthened roads to forested realms that I’ll never see
even if I went
as I cannot go to you
nor any word about you
no word would have been kind
but net to catch unintended trawl
as gold intrude
normalest of basins
and conjured your figure grinds out
they sing something I have been wanting to know
about silence
as pertains to love
and now will turn vine back through lattice
as a garment floating uneven down
ripple and shadow
a blossom
frozen in falling
a flower shop
opening its drunk rigors at dawn
ray undulating
around the sheller’s finally fanged
mushroom fire
as cleat
on concrete is tap
like one’s remembered
gestures of love make uneven music and faltering play what once gave
push to the grand now slips around
a sea urchin tuned to K-pop
a seaside market’s white linoleum
table gives a little when you lean
against it
and it’s dawn;
buyer for that night’s special make
judgement in the dog’s first light
and yesterday’s stink not fully hosed out
damaging midnight’s property
sings at the curb
what was it
what brought
you to see another’s body and feel desire
what light
sings the gobbet sun and shadows
that striped the pool or was it the dark
surprised you entering a bibliography
of lost turns
between wall and gate
Is it possible
short-wave signals
range over the ocean
when was it
you first knew you were or were not dead
in the hallway
or on the kitchen floor
while the cockatiel squawked
or noticed only its own reflection
in birdcage mirror and nothing outside
or woke from dream unsure
your path
through the world might just be a free trial
an ultimate technique the figure
which Carl said at lunch is
like a disc
without space or time to commodify it
I think instead is full of slides and trapdoors
a ladder
a song
don’t wrap it up
I’ll take it home in my hands
even though
we are down to one lane
what does holding
the disc which is a void make you forget
the trick with wheels for
the meters run out
even the star map
infinite presents
a figure that parceling into titles may wall off
match the wood to the old wood
scrap what’s instinctively not part of the design
they sing it this way
use the words
about the loss of the figure who would explain
the bark
a sap
a pith
leaves
bright fall
and how it is to see the nests in winter
and how it is to smell the burning forests
their
ash running away from the mountain—
the absence of what we thought mother was and father was
when we were small and needed;
they sing that escape
play an exit
a pitcher’s playlist approaching the mound and a bass drum to count the steps
She said the show was still going on
when she left
in a wedding dress
echoing coliseum behind her becoming
a moon
as it disappears and instead
a departing music arrives under her bare feet;
palms grow acres above
confetti in her hair
she said human
before I can
pack up my tent and go
how does
last night learn morning or it’s morning
time develops
like any interview will
I’m through with burning questions
that was her who walked by
ok
did she believe we searched all night
the houses
their secrets
the past
writhed invisibly its visage
and where
a rider might come aboard one notices
the birds differ
feather in a more
vigorous order
as dunes refashion
the beach after a dream of searching
each house for a bride
bride one has
always been
paused at erotics of last
thought
I’m here to kill some part
of myself with either exposure or a shroud and it may take all afternoon
It will be
a daily observation
a glimpse that will
throw my reflection back
like fish I can no more start over
or start
new chain of interlocking construction
paper
than I can begin my life again
or bring back dead
somewhere
in the park’s the fountain that makes you make the same lesson over again
as the bus driver swings down
the lane in the snow
and misquotes Blake
we throw off one set of snow chains and immediately put on another
augural twenty-six or so letters that thrush
our names from cities and corner town
bars weird compositions left
to rust and grow
long to become
their sons and daughters and grow
long beard in hardware aisles
among boxed nails a screw
arranged by its bore
from the bridge
to a no-longer-fashionable neighborhood
one might let drop a talismanic object
into shallow crawfish ponds rivuleted between concrete anchors
broken street
water clear
as junkyard
windshield when it ripples
emerges
a kind of voice
wave that would become the suit
you know is hanging upstairs
in all possible cedar closets
window open
foraging song