a
life
I
took you into careless arts
in
the held beginning of figure, your
witness
shifts breath
rope
from clay to pain
knots
running new gifts while
threeway
waters stare at two
bent
beasts fallen from shaken
earth
gods, drowned ash, knotten
blade;
your gaze takes mutable
oath,
your hands rudder
wild
story, No One’s spray
roaring
blue in the no that climbed
brightly
petrified glory behind
species
bearing threeway days
and
skies or deep new drop, glossy
image
I dug myself, it tells things
from shapefront old the now
it flies, the bird
hands,
each a young killing heart
turned
a neutral many into a harmless him
bodies
flip midair, profiles empty
of
marble by blood by their buds
beating
stone to disperse the it
the
new cow that talked without insane
manner
marking self or other, a word too
many
heard by a provoking forest
fearful
itself, withdrawing, arms
hide
across the where or form
a
beat to talk statue, always
growing
that word by stiff noise
catching
the their there auditor, a
taste
while revelation supplants human
and
beast trans/forms senseless salt, leaping
death’s
many faces, displaced wings
gossiping
upon beaks been break
wolf
the throat to wound quick
breasts/ sliced
-off,
spreading
talk
talk talk a treeswung
tongue
Syd Zolf’s most recent books are No One’s Witness: A Monstrous Poetics (Duke, 2021) and a selected poetry, Social Poesis (WLU Press, 2019). Honors include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and finalist for several other prizes. They live in Philadelphia and teach at the University of Pennsylvania.
