G.C. Waldrep

Exclusive Beautiful Grapheme War
May 12, 2013 Waldrep G.C.

Exclusive Beautiful Grapheme War

 

1.
history means touch, bodies
falling     the compressed eye
grapheme’s small banquet
love knows, a long glass art
something broadcast    now
inside the body’s native
living symbol, its first porcelain
compressed, method enacts
its voice:  guide, trail,
a beautiful descent     touch’s
heavy problem, magnetic
halting time like a machine
seems slow at first, breaks pace
the oracle always saying
tongue, ideogram, system
three-state lover’s red
imaginary orchard, exclusive
wayfaring children     loaf-cum-
prefecture     glass beehive
the body’s remains want little
another stem-cell applet
one language, one dead animal
fresh gun terror     another
pulsar almost no longer moves
ambient word-machines
make a new war music, yet
a more generous vigil slakes
the true body cut inside time

2.
rain, denied a certain symbol
makes one war (something
makes another)     beautiful texture
gun loaf  / compressed dance
a magnetic method sees through
the body’s films     little hand
prefecture, red water language
how much experience makes one
almost word, almost body
pulsar music     sustains oracle
correct, a cut tongue inside
ligature     living like an ideogram
among experience, a grapheme
true but (made imaginary)
sequence, glass without tape’s
vivid sex banquet, porcelain
through touch or “yet”’s new
lesion-face     broadcast orchard
love’s cell-wall desert enacts
a dead state, falling bodies,
meteor inside saying’s complete
first hush     ambient descent
of the eye’s flesh-guide made
right, a more exclusive singularity
the body wants     nervous, raw
animal proof in a low place
outside counterpoint     (another
mean word flips music back)

3.
first, leave your native
system     exigence, ligature
a black tongue breaks
the body-state reads like
something rule no longer
wants     terror now language
apprehends     ambient,
falling     porcelain dollar
love’s blackish counterpoint
halting in its slow dance
a dead art, unlike music’s
new magnetic lesion
touch remains a problem:
the hand’s small machine
just guns the dead want
glass almost-bodies denied
a word’s true touch
along the trail of history
one animal, one ideogram
compressed     red vigil
of the body’s desert     flesh
heavy without its history
enacts a beautiful sequence,
exclusive, correct, complete
the wayfinding eye cut
inside the body’s meat-hood
its imaginary rest     fire’s
blood applet, red box, hive

4.
glass words made imaginary
like a cell’s water, yet art’s
vesture, ideogram, meteor gun
take the mind’s hushed sequence
inside the body’s desert
beautiful war experience the eye
completes     a wayfinding strut
films the orchard’s imaginary
flesh like porcelain, like fire
remaining true to its one
lover’s low magnetic dance or
hive’s plaqued counterpoint,
words made possible in time
of proof, language falling now
terror no longer wants music’s
one true ligature     sex’s
blurred method’s small machine
knows something:  a long,
halting brush among the living
history, heavy without bodies,
love’s first native system
doubles its guns in a new place
making language possible,
flip-touch inside art’s broadcast
prefecture     another word
machine’s true body, its gloved
son among the dollar’s vivid
banquets     compressed, denied

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021).  Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, New England Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals.  Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.