John Schertzer

 Poetry 

 

 

Literature as Equipment for Living

 

The reason the door opens and closes

It says.  It says, initiate of time

You have run out of numbers, yet there are

Still moments aside to haunt or pierce you.

But no average day; days are not cobbled

Of averages, though to notice like

And not like, helps to raise the city wall.

The door slams or drifts open; it’s as if

There was a muscle in my mind, the man

Says, the pink spider who believes it is

A man believes it’s said.  But there is yet

No song, and there are no names for flowers.

It’s as if there was a muscle in our mind

Cramping as the wind moves the door, moves

The mind back another quarter inch.  We

Says the spider, referring to itself.

And the door says it’s me, and draws nines.

 

 

The Inenviable

 

The sun rises and the beach is scoured

With trebly lines.  People forget and enter

Through numerous lacerations believing

 

That it strengthens their connection to

The numinous in them.  Lines like the once

Eroticized fingernail traces

 

In the frost of a back seat window.  Nature

It is said, leaves its incomplete insignia

Repeatedly, forcing guesses.  Where

 

The undulations of the sea meet the 

Crenellations of the sand.  Where to go

From here?  Only desire guesses it can

 

Say so.  Whispering its silent agency

Its secret police everywhere impossible

To detect.  Singing wind over the grain.

 

 

 

Convenience Struggles

 

After being admitted out into the rain

He found his camera had an aperture

And in that aperture was an abyss

Did the abyss think with him when he thought

Of it, did it sing to him with its silky lines

Like a mouth torn off the sky at night

And implanted in the maturity of his knowing

In its paranoid purity, its simplicity

Lining the nest with stones, gold seat with deadfall

And leaves?  It was convenient to say so

To think so murdered the self one was not 

The idea in the first place, meaning it was different

 

 

Unpacking

 

The bull flowers against the brick wall

 

He is crushed

 

He is made of mice and eats only the trash

left by the vector of the Victrola

 

Squares were falling from the ceiling

but they had no dimension

 

And pretty soon the bull had redesigned itself

into a trailer park of wasps, and small people

 

made of clay

and the dung of dungbeetles

 

Surfaces everywhere.  Everything about this house 

was paper thin, or less

 

So he went off into the forest to find a maze he knew

 

Having no dimension meant having to fight

for space, for a volume

of clouds on which ghosts stood

 

resembled one another, smoked

as streaks of quark and ember filled the container

 

A name takes no space, but arguing it will

 

She said bull, and he said I have an aquarium

like you

 

 

 

Invisible Mind

 

Something in the dark was waiting

for you: shadow of a hand or a man—

 

How can there be a hand wrapped

in shadow in the darkness

 

when the night needs light

to be afraid.  It was his dark suit

 

Nevermind says the murmur

and a robin singing on a windowsill

 

This show’s got a murder tucked beneath 

but we can only hear it swallow us

 

I seem to lose control of you

the swallow sings to who knows whom

 

and the absence of a lamp

shining at night atop a crooked elm

 

The night he seems to lose control of:

the man hid away beneath a scroll

 

of light as dawn paints coils

disappearing in the evening

 

The dawn is might.  It smells

not sulfur nor wholly of pine

 

but the breath of itself

its cinemas of corn fields 

 

on their way out of sleeping 

the grin of incident signatures