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[Poetry]

THAT ON WHICH THE MIND ALIGHTS, MOMENTARILY PLACID AND WELL-LIT 
by Aaron Anstett


                                     "From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight..." - Whitman

Say we Google Earth then zoom and zoom until pixels blur and I confuse
outsized flecks for the infinite’s distillate, with which  our every cell’s suffused.
Say I long to leave my brain to pseudoscience, yearn to marry the very air
as I hoped but failed to in his last residence on the unkempt block, car in flames 
outside on asphalt, plywood board over door next door, men still sleeping
on stoops when I left, walking fast past the county jail. Dear Ineffable,
What brazen declarative about the world in general at last says it?



PORTENT

The fray of birds flickering over strip mall, for instance,
knotting and loosening in air brine of roofing tar
and next-door sea—vinegar, rain, rot—insists
something pressing to you and soon you insist,
memorizing, about rust-color sunset’s special effects,
less pink-red dyed meat glistens than bit lip’s red-pink
or red-red gone gutter leaves sepia of stabbed man’s T-shirt.
You cannot prove he blundered past one morning
on footbridge over dribbling creek—throbbing traffic?--
and never breathed a word. The big fuss persists:
orange of flammable fabric, otherworldly orchid
scarlet in speckled patches beyond pay day loans,
pharmacy, discount cigarettes. As if slathered in lubricant,
each thing in teetering landscape gleams. Miracle, maybe
you think, body repeating. Lucky not endlessly.

Aaron Anstett's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, trnsfr, and Upstairs at Duroc, among others. He is the author of the poetry collections Sustenance, No Accident, and Each Place the Body's.


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