Poetry |

from “The Fourth Moment”

The lake remains. Also, people in their high country.

 

I’m late in this mad order of contrast bringing the cup and shore

I imagine the institution as it aims to be, always a function, indemnity in the vortex named

Berkeley.

You are a question giving an attainable box the lot it needs to form.

Circus the day for discussion with the nobody there with me, a spirit in the woods of abandon

the photograph of abstract difficulty, the storefronts changing in a country routine that evaporates as it hushes dust across the moon. I count days through your return and count not

to be bored with what life attends or enacts in images and machines. Yeah, I use

some words again and have trouble moving across the transom: I’m too big to be a spider

and I like the ineptitude of being a person. The teacher asked if the method has a name,

I wandered for forty years in parentheticals to distinguish myself. I kept my collar popped in the wind, came back in tune.

 

For what / It’s unclear

to live long enough to lose optimal plains. Division claimed the spring, which

defied the flooding bells the sandbags were made for, and I learned that he’d been asked

by another before anything. A song is one form to pass memory into the machine’s own

waves which I could say are finite stars of our own plays. The eyes count back

from 14 to issue conditions in the weather misplacing drums. Sense is a courting day

we kept bargaining for with our particular meals collected from no farm of reference.

 

Planes honk on the distressed tarmac and

I cap the posture of a column’s proportion

so ice goes into the plant as marauding delays

panic often / Orange backs up in the driveway

summoning a half-shone ring of basic light

trees cutting off May from the rest of the world

if plural could play the part it hears against

the hearts of men like parachutes and fired thirst

the anticipation of my neighbor in minutes

having ruined the opportunity to write today,

I don’t recall how exactly, what water was

in the windows of simple misunderstanding

there is something in the other room to be read

the paintings become some equipment of life

to offer annotation and inconsistent speech

to do more with one curtain and another color

I aim to dress myself by eight and read these books

I am behind

there is the expense of fiction against a green panel

I am behind in my promises today

I’m behind

I am behind, coming back to be human

I am behind and have been thinking how a month

I am behind and can omit a few days of this

We live against the sea

I’m behind in this form of days—

Contributor
Amanda Nadelberg

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Isa the Truck Named IsadoreBright Brave Phenomena, and Songs from a Mountain. She is the founder of Culture Forms and lives in Oakland, CA.

Posted in Poetry

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