Issue 17: Adam Flint
Lant Skips
Unfinished ongoing no other account • Oh for days • Oh for days • the wolfwastes • fallen all joy • Hands rimmed with beetle and delight in the lilac lost • Only light the worms seep soft • little bits of body-lit mulberry blood • turning sericeous • cages against rime • tricking contours to glint just • I have found my level and my level is loved • snug in the black crescent of culvert • dirt is fine • pulverised • affection to touch • The childhood was • waiting to grow into • a lant-skip • pilling-textured • test card-hued • persisting with an awkward posture • lest an imagined watcher judge • more graceless a switch of limbs • Bruised calves plagued by playground grit whipped up by mobs of air • Cold • Cold the first fading presences • Overcoated grown-up backs going into the mist • The tunnel of frost-sleeved arches • intricate brilliance of twig and limb • I let them go through them anew • a new silence • cloven in the grown space • a lant-skip • a remnant • knowing going comes • Same as in the late august gardens • crouched where the watering can spout rusts • Into the damaged aperture • Ferric webs and brackish • Lant-skip stilled face deep as querent • tranquil on encountered water • floats conflated in and outer • lant-skips • Oh for days • Things less municipal • The wastes wider trash less human more leaf • runny in early morning cold • mouldered sludge from flakes • once touched sews blains into the dermis • pieces time • Oh for days • I have not wondered enough • at the need infinite givens have to be defined • Ringed on scrub by oxen-brindle fading with the light • Boxes of tongue-slicked nostrils snorting hot ruminant breath • the jostle of the closing circle • the revenant detail • before this gammy transit • lame-sided • endwise-viewed • continues oh for days • Oh for days the evening drove the darkening greens to host • drove the darkening greens to host degrees of blue follow • their journey through the wincing air • notes slight press upon the tenderest receptor • Sorrow a pressure to rest on • the solace of loam • deep-odoured moist of must of cruxes • and lazarus forests • The foldgarth in the hollow • watched unseen where stiffened starlight peppered the hazel-bush • the camouflaged imagines • to carve cold edges of space • as saturn's shepherding moons • cripple the craved-for hiddenness of things • Ambiguous details mass • intensify and whiten • veer towards a soiled yellow at their palest point • seethe and crust erupt and flake • assassin-soft maelstroms wolfen-grey • Monstrous the dawn • Waking where shiverful leaf-blades pucker • the rotund dead block form growth from flower • necks specked with spit and the lips chipped away • several-faced • in broken pieces of glass • oh for days • Oh for days the further fields • roughened light green by one pearled ray • eyes that crave an ocean to look over well • do not spill • teeter at ciliate rims • to pile a saline glaze • touching not to long in one place • lest it glisten • the gaze • and liquefy the world the same • as the hemispheres suffer
Kinglet
As a reflection of scale
hidden in one of the herd and further
stowed away in the eagle's plumes
to birdthrone
whites pinken
irises gloam dimmen sheen
in the meant to be limner of things
a hymn
for favour
aloof before noon
denial imbibes in settling light
wine half-hidden under heaven's even regard
and drifts
in distances a split cognition frees
lurid bliss and falser peace balance none mine
nor after tense surrender apt & quiet
open daylight
ally of a goodly garden
configured by virtue of solitude alone
can I erect my arena
and dissipate at its porous limits
to close the door on my double
my double now
warding
completing worlds away
beneath the desperate brilliance of the heavens' jeer and vanish
where are my hands
where my feet
but under cuffs of cloud and hem
of hedgerow am I silent ranter
holding the whole burned through together
the hole burned through the tongue that wrote the light and dark of god
one of the multiple lives unhad
believed to bide unfigured in the finite as
something faintly caudal at
the canthus
an attendant
I am my own inmost shadow
constance and horizoned existence
render all but invisible only
met alone
in a strange and private smile
the ticking early to loosen widens
sanglant instants self-vulned
the september sun
knowing when it's beaten leaves
soothed by the season's hour of fire
I can finally look at you divested of flames
your naked radius midpoint to red giant
how loss gains
only when regulus
only as wren
hidden in the eagle's wings
do I transcend
Thallus
cudbear deepspersed duskmist door
frames low mammalian
odour since lax and blunt
branches inside rosehood fount
pinks heavenswell
Scapegrace
Head-high rye-grass
Infant-cling to the lilt and burr
voices
float over broken pollen
A small force enters parts
stalks in the child’s field
grows
a gap that won’t close
Thumbs to forefinger
tips run
soft-rush stem-lengths
scalping them of flower
The sky remains
an eternal
adjournment on lifted bouquets
*
Years
brimmed with patience
fed tented wings at rest
on flowerheads
meadow-breezes
spoke to and swayed
Because there was no voice in the wine
And none took place where cold dusk-parlours
dense glass jars ranked witness
to a later
silent vintner
said wine dark and hard-bled
from the sedentary feminine turned
park-frequenter
with black wine
cold as the black greens The stars
distant
plink in the runnels
*
Sunk
in ink-
black
black
upward glancings mirror
void-speed
eye of corby
rimless fixity high over dark
salt-marsh guess and marram
dry snow white choke tearquint essence
coursing sulcate heavens
the many subtle bearings and tendence
clarified blankness of both
*
Cloud space
pulsing through dentate
parted leaves
shocks the cognate
foliage
to gnit
a root out of the human
*
The weak
unto a vanishing point
drink strong
drink on the stones
The hard burn the ebb
and flow takes the edge off
takes the edge off
days
*
A gaunt face leaves
make in shadows moves under wind
the wind that was one
by one through the alders
hidden ahead of it
outhouse thresholds
shut doorway shadows broke
gnawed by famished light
*
The Vagabond
dwells in the welt
the edge
joining sole to upper
each step
along the root
of earth and word
seamed
space
meted between
dwells in the welt
tissue-ridge raised
on skin
raw from thorncrib
contact
*
Rising
and walking away
injects a thin shade
deep across flowering clover
the eve’s bleached wilt
*
Tears readied
years ago
on a dusty pace-scuffed path
hot and coastal
one summer
fall
*
Small
pale
green/grey leaves
light on the fissured herring-bone bark
this last
low sun
Adam Flint lives in Berlin. Previous poetry has been published by Critical Documents, Stand, and Shearsman, among others.
Copyright © 2016 by Adam Flint, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
