Sunday, March 12, 2017

Devon Balwit - 1 / 1-2-3-4-5 / 1-2-3



Devon Balwit is a poet/educator working in Portland, OR. She uses the height of her dog's leaps to augur her fortunes for the day.

***

1.
I have asked you and I have asked you


what is the story you are trying to
tell me what is the story you are


lacking a thread to lead me through
the maze of you I have lost my


bearings in the fog cannot make
out the next herm the blazed trunk


you folded that way curled round
gastropod foot tight to where I


could enter you flicker from a
distance that exceeds my fuel


my desire to cross lightyears you
at the galaxy’s edge ever receding


your story flaring behind a comet
dwindling until I can no longer


***

2. Silence in the Plaza Hotel: Theme & Variation (Las Vegas, New Mexico)


I.
A public space
with no muzak

demands tribute,

thoughts not forced

into brightness,
mouth not fed words
overly simple.

The high-ceilinged room
opens to a park,
room and park
both empty,
allowing the mind
to shake off
stiffness,
stretching sinews
of syllables
until it finds
full extension,
a holding,
then a letting go.

II.  
The silence awaits thought,
thought aquiver like a mouse,
mouse awaiting the moment,


the moment of the zigzag dash,
the dash to the ripe round seed,
seed rich to bursting,

bursting through teeth,
teeth feeding the hunger,
a hunger ever unsated.

III.  
Window light doubles each object, color and shadow,
plant, table, lamp, chair meeting my gaze in silence,
leaving me to decide if I am welcome or resented,
the room impatient to return to mute colloquy.

IV.
The silence intrudes
like an ocular migraine,

a strobing
spilling from eye to eye,

until the visual field
dances,

retina a plaything
of a brain

refusing to recognize
the known,

reveling
in its perfect storm.

V.
The table offers its back
to the open book, the scratching pen,
accepting the full weight
of devotion.

***

3. The Personal is Parabolic Y=x2+1 for domain d= {-4≤x≤4}


I.

Such a cackling from the chicken with each egg as if the world should cheer

celebrating the cloacal, awestruck

by the smooth blankness.

Really?
What
of me?
Am I not also
a wonder at my desk, broody, laying,
each poem pecking its tiny egg tooth, desperate to be released?


II.
She swore the whip-its were for an art project.  Many a parent has
believed such an outlandish claim.  Why not?
Much easier than
the truth,
for
what is
truth, anyway?  I
got up to hijinks and survived.  Hip mom,
I cross my fingers and say, Just don’t do art-projects and drive, OK?


III.  
Aren’t you as sick of political rants as I am?  Admit it.
There’s only so much an artist can take.
And yet, to put our
heads in
sand
now means
a country like Wu Wei’s,
happy to inspire us behind barbed wire,
a cell’s blank walls perfect for screening artists’ dangerous corruption.