Jonathan Weinert

With My Senses in Ruins | Scavenge and Transform
February 17, 2016 Weinert Jonathan

With My Senses in Ruins

 

Here’s a recipe for seeing: sleep
and feeling as a long-expected season feels
the day the sky entrusts its new campaign

 

of sails and sheets. Where in time do figures,
half-imagined, blend themselves with lawns
as standards blend with all exceptions?

 

Always the same, or same-ish, bank of low
suggestive clouds, the freshness of the air
in theory. Charcoal smudges under trees

 

across a reach of dried-up swamp relate
to passions forcefully declared then left

 

to fade, like fragrances. What’s wanted: light,
in which the ends throw shadows and the means
retreat, uncovering a floodplain where

 

memorials, deployed at intervals, describe
a pattern unaccounted for among the
new curations. Where in time

 

does darkness, not sustainable, give way
to brightnesses the ur-ironic must abjure?
In the rough impasto of the leaves

 

a gunship hoists its signal. The rundown trees
throw lattices across the stream.

 

 

Scavenge and Transform

 

No thanks, I think I’ll lie here for a while,
the long low scumbled pasture, greener than
a poisoned lawn, ascending to a blue

 

so self-contained it doesn’t owe me
an apology. Maybe I should figure out
my next obscure obsession, but I’m fine

 

right here, for now; the needled earth is soft
and faintly fragrant of decay. Someone’s built
a little fence. That’s nice. See how the woods

 

extend into a shadow out of which
I half expect my old companion

 

to appear, the nightjar formerly embedded
in my chest, whose song recalls me
to a moonlit gate, a scene in retrospect

 

derivative of Keats but with its own
peculiar overtones of cardamom and—
is it bleach? The gate, though never opened,

 

gives into the ruined foreporch
of an opulent estate. I recognize
its blind façade, its windows black

 

as switched-off cellphones, and its low
seawall angling out along the headland road.

 

All night penumbral ships tie up, and hands
unload their cargoes down a ramp to cellars
underneath the north parterre. At length

 

the empty vessels slip across the blank
reflecting surface of the harbor, bound
for coastlines where the ice has eaten coves

 

into the soft volcanic substrate of the hills.
No thanks. I think I’ll lie here for a while.
One path goes west along the little fence,

 

the other south a ways until the dark
enclosures of the oaks obscure its line.

 

Jonathan Weinert is the author of three books of poems: A Slow Green Sleep, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize; In the Mode of Disappearance, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize; and Thirteen Small Apostrophes, a chapbook. He is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin. Jonathan lives and works in Stow, Massachusetts.