Poetry |

“The Web,” “Unadorned Air” & “An Eye Under a Hundred Tons of Earth”

The Web

 

 

I and a spider sought a padlock.

He won. The numbers he arranged with nimble legs arranged

Me in the beginning, and begat

The want of time; the gunfire of purpose too.

 

As loser, but gladly,

I furnished a loan

That would let life slut itself with love of all its objects

In a procession absent hurry or fear.

 

The spider on his thin creation lurks in the shade of a dullardly plane.

Witness cements a site wet as a vantage

Bare enough of intent that anyone can push its flesh into their name.

Through sincerity’s long scope I observe

 

The seen go about in ache, for complicated lessons

In pain. But, too dull of mind, the observation

Sours, its charm jangling unthanked,

Such that any trick could catch them up in it.

 

Even my numb tongue could lure one in …

And one could stride about the baffle of the lock —

And, graven, perch upon its shackle’s interred tip —

And chuckle, wistful, at the fiddling that tickles like the spidered skin.

 

 

◆     ◆     ◆     ◆     ◆

 

 

Unadorned Air

 

 

Push at a pain for drowning in.

 

What could I try to hang in you,

Air?

Air? Air. Greed loves you, Wish.

 

Is lapping red at your soft hull.

Put

My boat in air, my oar through.

I’m

 

Damp in the heart. I’m a rotted

Knot.

The past is what I’ll grovel over

 

Until I can kill the air of wishes.

I’ve

No loss to credit nothing with,

Just

 

The fact that any air can leave.

 

 

◆     ◆     ◆     ◆     ◆

 

 

An Eye Under a Hundred Tons of Earth

 

 

What is blinded by the scale

Arrives renderable,

 

That witness the scope

Leaves unrendered,

Without epiphany,

That in the amounting

Reclaimed from aboutness

Its wisdom,

Without entropy,

 

The latent facing-up of possibility

Eases you

From rendering’s irredeemable etch

Into a permeable un-pity,

With a density.

No possession does this put loose

To the thing’s qua,

An untidy pile.

Inside of randomness lurks lower orders.

To face this soil raw

Of claims upon it, repair

The drillbit’s jailbroke limiter in earth.

 

At this pressure of submersion

Is no white coat to be draped in.

Only the aping of

An effort to repair

The scope that aping broke.

Contributor
Logan Fry

Logan Fry is the author of Harpo Before the Opus (Omnidawn, 2019) and of poetry in Conjunctions, Image, The Rumpus, Fence, Lana Turner, Annulet, New American Writing, and The New York Review of Books.

Posted in Poetry

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