by: Mark Wallace
In this first installment of a two-part series, Mark Wallace takes stock of our current moment, crafting a poetry that explores our multi-level confusion while articulating our shared, pervasive sense of having lost the thread of not only our own narrative, but of the world’s: “it’s over in the old/ way it’s over/ in the new, I/ can walk only/ out and be/ here…”
Here comes
the crane to lift the
crates off the docks
goods in motion
people in motion
the surge
grip and heave
nothing staying still
music and liquor right
outside the steady cubicle
the worker
there and there again
at last gone too
Even sitting quietly
one cannot stay
some mourn the move some
celebrate it, laugh, all changing
the motion of it, not
the fact of motion
I don’t wonder that you
are gone or I am,
that we collided,
curled, touched fingers touched
the air, I
wonder that we don’t
know better how to
recognize the impression of
each other
on our bodies
how to let it
slip away
how to see ourselves already
tracing
into the distance
wavering
*
You can look
for something out
side to save you
wood path down
into the ravine I run
where the dried-up river hits
its bottom the radical
poets take
each other out, so
much boredom
so much war-ripped
concrete cracking
surge of massive
economic abstraction
Taking
a walk in the park after
the sun comes up maybe
I want to bring
my hands back to who
they might touch
in the long
moments between what
I know and think
I know
strollers in the flat
afternoon sun
labor’s well-divided rooms
paying out the calculated
sickness wage
and who
talks about wishing
to recover oneself, street
and people leaning on poles and polls
dredging
my own body’s non
responsive responsiveness
it’s over in the old
way it’s over
in the new, I
can walk only
out and be
here, this
neighborhood microbe
coursing
through the coursing
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a novel, Crab, and book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy. Selections of his multi-part long poem The End of America, which he has been writing since 2005, have appeared in numerous publications. He lives in San Diego, California.
