“Knight of Experience” and Other Poems

A myna bird glancing downward.

May Jason Wept

                        maybe that’s what’s 

always Common, all knowledge of the ground

out in the world where no one, greenly, sleeps

In Cassville, Joplin, Eden, Oklahoma, 

Lawrence, Kansas even, Greenly. Even were 

the levees brought to quays, all that’s common 

of the gourded wrist-strap 

( shaves a better bridge.

A bridge?        Facets of the                  Dated

range— Town genre, “kisses, ties,” then sleeps.

But better?

I sleep— The vineyard, too, a freighted cloth

it breathes! A time for Job and a

pen for Rear, off all the gardens of its dearth.


Was it for  THIS? He squeaks 

Earths, earth        Mosquitos, lemons, fat

Perhaps

Wordsworth’s cottage facing hills of     “mossen gay”

In Bois D’Arc, Battlefield, or the light     there’s 

charge reflects, a later charge    A weapon

crowding in a chair , does it even       crowd the chair             for this

Any which, conversion to the common element

compounds the penny and that bends the penny

until I pick it up

The offer’s worlding score…. 

houses where the keys are minted, I thought

There’s law in love, white 

Lonesomeness, smokestacks one’s binds can’t handle

just can’t         but for the courage mounts

And for the benjamins whose concession erodes

The sleeping giant's crown 

But better sleep forth it comes      takes medicaments 

               shines, purrs, , it sings

On the same old what?

One look. Tomorrow, and that’s it there 

The end rolling one’s look forward, 

            as if the train made noise

Knight of Experience

A relatively bloodless affair,         hmm…

tenable land for aphorists (?), love’s 

Willing river, and Delmore! At the monitor’s

tinkle, Clicks the album twice, its kicks

The Singe of too much memory revolves 

the silly indemnity. To the land’s great sea, 

the / body “On this day…” love’s (murdered) 

name ,on the list      Flood’s language, the lamplight, 

These fine collapses that are the names one takes,, 

 

Or for grasses (fine) that 

the dream had faces was enough

for now—Out-throwed, 

                     that Beacon swung 

Caused a pin some hours       in the spine there later 

to emerge, replenished of its texture, converge, 

emergently, re-emerges what "in the lonely alleys 

make," And yet one laughs? One laughs. A fixture  

What in the lonely alley makes one’s only vessel flat

Slight deltoid pinch, a tune to be recalled

Stag of Mourning 

Beginning again-

st

In as much as some secretes one asks the litter “Why

?” Why secretes ye so upon the banded nine, nine

Times out of twenty and nine times out of nine, The

Covertures’ iridescence? , Kessler’s arcing 

the tell, of which my Dale has shepherded.

Saul’s knife, his wife

          Withholds she such the moon-milked canapé (!)

Of what which stinks in heat? Stinks more. 

This gardened anything, Asks “who?” stop’s, 

wing-shot, coilshorn, in the garnered head of state.

Is it content’s land? “I once knew and now 

It’s I who keeps the cables warm.” Yet, she’s 

shaved down to her core,

A witch the fjordsong, or plover or to what’s a plover 

The saw-drawn tincture says: To either 

signal, a mirror pockets its decision

Perhaps on a great painted stage it filters out—

that you thought that

thought-statistics kept a groan from burgeoning— 

You, who, though you thought you knew, were the only 

Who that knew: A myna’s hail, and whose 

pajama’d bottom-sak that’s flatlined, followed-out,

and frill-less, 

Makes us make of us 

a fartened maiden gesture

Amid the the who walks so whitely 

He walks in sand, keeps watch for passing cars,

That’s framing…? What frames Paul’s life

Want’s polygon

Covered Wagon

Up to that point

I had from then gone

On to end thinking

In such an era as that 

To end such an era

I had then gone 

Albeit from one point to 

Another thinking to end 

Thinking and since then 

Have felt life trickle out

Like a thick braid

   in a fanbelt

Or a thrust in the air

Like a thick braid 

   caught in a fan

Where I had then 

When the era had such that

It needed 

That blink of an endpoint

That flash of a thought 

Burst at the nape

Where the bead gathers

Dust


Cary Stough is a poet from the Missouri Ozarks and a former library worker from Massachusetts. He is an editor at the Cleveland Review of Books. Find more about Cary at carystough.com.


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