Fabulous Species and Landscapes

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Up upon the hook so done, the foot-bound shuttle of unlost rabbit-soul is hung in wind and window of not this, but ....
Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Fabulous Species and Landscapes That piled-up melon, bright with waxen chill, the wide avenues of choice tamp down breath into vacuum-packed bricks. You can stack together a week’s worth. Felt-covered mittens are offered at the swinging doors on the verge of the walk-in freezer. Your own coat though, whichever kind is yours, your neck swaddled or not, will most likely suffice. That isn’t to say shopping dallies, sojourns long enough to inventory what you are selecting from. Arm extensions aside, unless the brand’s sold out, there are no traumas here. The ancestor of agriculture speaks what is now an isolated language, undertaker’s ribald tongue. Fine suit, woolen, excavated from basement or storage facility. His grammar-making mind, it begins at three weeks to index the backwoods people with snatched children. It would herald a shipping crate. Your village, your manor, now not run by nightwatch commander, ambulance repair matrons. Might you know the distinction between great and snowy egrets if you saw one of each? One has golden slippers at its bottom. A hollowed out book can be compacted with its feathers. Stacked together, a library of insulators, set to fly with a spine string marking chapters. Your sneakers are emblazoned with wings. Ps eroded to Fs long ago— Grimm’s law will darken the spots on your palette. Dear pater, hallowed be. Or streams full of many pish. The wood walking bridges were constructed by careful measurement. You once were unclear if they were poisonous mushrooms. The town cooper suggested rats could be fed different kinds. The wheeler claimed that whiskers on the stem meant it was both safe to eat and that you would enjoy its earthen undertones when sautéed to an even brown in a pat of butter and jigger of whiskey. They took a saw with them. An epic afternoon. You had a bag of pebbles and your cobalt sling rag. King David washed at the sandy streambed his ears and toes. Gargantua pissed a town underwater. They disappear each other. On your many travels have you carried in your knap a replica of your sleeping face. In repose it gains its eternal self. What tales of foraging lack in danger, they pocket. At dinner back home, your guests undress. The churchwarden’s knees are supple and ruddy. The radish and ears of corn radiate health. The basket of eggs you pinched from the whorish green grocer will stay raw no matter how long you boil them. The choices with which you were presented at the supermarket were altered by cold rooms of ageless produce. Summers mean no harm.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Garden-throat’s Tale He dreamt first he was met on a snow-blown block at night by a slasher who scalpelled a trough from his chin to the tip of his sternum and pulled his esophagus out. He lay, breathing more openly in the wintry air until a nurse in burgundy found him and fit him with a length of green garden hose, and stapled him shut. Next he dreamt the slasher had been the one to fit him with the garden pipe, whispering his benedictions of growth & growing, and rechristening him Garden-throat. He received the blade, its handle riveted in steel. It was called Throater, and he carried it on with him on his travels. That is Garden-throat’s story.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Make Me Make Here's the character you will be dealing with -- not girthful precisely, eats peanuts like pain tablets. The air outside thins by the minutes. The meeting convenes at the top of the lift and, divided, the whole thing stalls. Do you recognize yourself yet, my friend? A private chair in the high-ceilinged hall. Some hack and flood, precious little trunks, hawks on the prowl. You do this anyway, footbridge be damned. With not unfeigned equanimity, approach the machine and begin. The neighbors you most want have donned red felt caps express from Guatemala your obsidian wish is flaked to precise near oblivian. Descending the parking ramp it's all about the same -intaglio shadow mountains strange book with no identifying number. Your fascination with the absurd provokes ridicule, from me at least. Your 'understanding' merely shows you're weak like a fox. My favorite king crumbles cheese crackers on his silk cravat, my queen brushes her nails on moonlit saturdays. Would a stenographer ease your obvious distrust of 'creative' writing? I was wearing a powdered wig when I learned cursive, Your Grace, beg pardon. "It could if it hadn't. A rhombus table, large, with a head | old cushy

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

rolly chairs | I was good this week | lots of tunes on my mind -ascendant note | clear against the horizon | heroic C (choleric?)" Oil paint you dabbed and dazzled your passage to the East with. He dreamt at night of a rabbit-sized cat. The heart of the matter's matter cannot be decided here. I hear that you need to be heard. I can mean one thing, like the author's intention, if you like -- trance and transcripts replicate the beating experience you have just spent reading what you just read, obliged not one line more. With tin snips and light beer cans my thane made me a sharp little milling machine. Swipe your card now. I made you some whiskey eggs -- each intact sun the shape of a riveting conversation the clouded eye of the seer, the whites on the glazed plate.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Meditations on a Ancient Feather The lemon a skylark into figures Clouds with the Blue battened Mudstone entoothed tinctures Archaeopteryx minerally fattened The sill at frogdeath of pond Horizon from horizon to Some many sandstones dawned The ossified bird flew Which of eyes no longer apertured A man of the body through A restless need sojourned Ferric lines unoxidized blue Beyond and behind A galvanized motion to find.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

No Whale In Sight Here I am with this sack of brine soaked clams, standing in the silt of a clear stream. Morro Rock, just down Cables beach, a miter streaked with guano, reaches a tuft of clouds charging southward. The break known as Hazard Canyon—— the waves of slatish Pacific curl around a rocky point and break in neat rows between uptilted strata of stone. The boys in suits of neoprene ending at their ankles, wrists and necks, silently shift the constellation they form, in long scooping strokes. In the coastal hills, a grove of eucalyptus planted in rows in the grey clay soil, a few exposed roots drag in the stream’s fast moving water like teeth knocked loose. The sun is a cool white. A thin boy has stood up on his board, the wave darkening to match his suit as it rises up above him. The plume of mist lifting off the crest, the boy’s loose shoulders and blank face.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

No Whale In Sight The fields of mustard vast enough to acquire height. The lookouts in the crosstrees. Ivory-gulls bracket small imitations of arches. Words only amaze me. The outward ornaments of a turtle-shell. This afternoon is this afternoon. An armless man selling gum near the bus stop his thick stumps bruise my collar bone, scalloped lip. The sea darkening. Only the sound of wind. Sand drifts & fleas in my knuckle folds.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Samarkand/Columbia Jules the maddening ruler began by stating that now is the time when the fishermen no longer fish when the osprey circles without diving when the cold mountain no longer pikes up in the sky because diamond air no longer wraps it around when the businessman is still at his desk when kings serve other kings when I serve the king of england when the cat no longer mouses when the sleepers no longer rest when houses on the street are bathed in electric fire when good people are no longer good when good people are no longer people when kilns fire nothing when a graveyard dog digs up his dead master when potshard emolates briefly when we are kith and kin when gods become intimate and private when ivory figurines no longer suffice when our savior hangs himself on an elm when our fathers recount their trips to the supermarket when gold is gold no more when all that we have done will be undone when oppossums bear live young upon the hay pallet when the farmer polishes his scyth and sickle when the hammer hammers a nailhead when stopping for coffee no longer means anything when the radio talks when the scholars give up when goldfish grow up to be koi when the old apartment lined and labyrnithed with scrolls books and apothecary cabinets is torn down and rebuilt up, shinier only when words point only to other words when there is no thing in this world when buttons are no longer tendered when we stop being mercantile with our souls when contractors market their work without warning when seaside villages rule the seas

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

when grasshoppers no longer rule the grass when the mortgage broker listens quietly when aunts are avuncular when old day laborers apply for visas when languages are not themselves when the knife shapener is coming when people here are like people there when the fern will grow in direct sunlight when the rabbit shank is defurred and hung for sale when the small numbers we carry around with us are inverse when flak is flak when the crested night warbler is filagreed and fine when pans are deglazed with filtered water when the airwaves are silent and the cold dark burst of the night is transmitted down the powerlines into every home and the ruled will take note

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Saying It Leaves flap through the dark windows like stiff-veined flags. Wind stirs much of the street. An uncut lime is small and fits in the palm’s hollow, near the wrist. It turns like a key: the apartment door and the neighbors’ door, the front door to the sidewalk beneath the tree of urgent flags, and the windows which seem so much like passages—— should be looked through, but not stepped through. Inside the refrigerator, the light blinks out again, again the calm of cold puts off expiration a little longer. The smell of the wind before its charge through the window, the odor of gas announces the maniacal blue flame, rising smoke wraith and the sweet forgiving smell, the long dedication of the tea whistle, the tea’s wheaty steam. On the teacup’s lip, very nearly saying it. There is no detail. No turn to make. Only the heat before, the heat after.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

The Belief in Baleful Stars As if the face were of a man Thin stars with elongated tails: 3s naturally imply a vertical axis—— a scaffolding of degrees, as in top mid low—— the three will not commingle, skygrowth cannot upsurge a human. Stonedrift, outcrop, stalactite, snagstone. The cosmic triad tacks man squarely between sky and rock. This is me talking. Principles of controlled movement, dryness & moisture, appear to have answers—— A stunning kit of ways to describe the predicament Should such a man (fond of study and fond of resolute characters) chance upon any, he will know the jade from the shingle at a single glance. How many words do I have for copy? breaks, losses, wormhole damage. There are five classics: changes, odes, history, rites and the comments on Spring & Autumn; and five elements: consumption, stability, growth, mutability and flexible incorruptibility; 3 may imply verticality, but 5 pins down a broad horizontal vellum field— the four quarters and the center—— wrist, neck, shame, foot, foot, ankle, tooth. The five sacred peaks, all of an interchangeable EDVLFIXQFWLRQRQDVLQJOHOHYHO

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

The Fire The fire ashes him. The waferesque moonlight pools upon the underscape of his eyes of night. His is not a story, but the shuffle of aspen one morning; the spill of cinders glowing some many years in the campground of dark remembrance. Burning by fire is the radical injection of air, to an equal degree, to all parts, a mob of molecules and air, a transformation through divvying-up. He is his reinstating. He is his again giving a cadaver to the concept it orphaned. He is his watching the flights of smokes. He is his walking storeward for coffee and churros in his grey coastal morning. He is his burning. The fire is its ashing him. He is his piling like together in a list. He is his listing.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

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Verbmongering About is to get vermilion on around dawn. That which is through, is off, purled off in sheets of off. Off and off. Bound a sickle is. A lid off is. Off a lid is. Off is a lid. All about, less or more than another other. Made the rabbit was. Made until the fur was off the rabbit was; eyes of, fish before were. Corn-nub cornea resembled. Tad-tail unplugged optic cable moved like. Cornea corn-nub moved like unplugged rabbit optic nerve retrembled. Long flanks of haired muscles tremble unlive the way unhaired muscle retremble alived. Up upon the hook so done, the foot-bound shuttle of unlost rabbit-soul is hung in wind and window of not this, but that, unclosed butcher haven. Not ever eat, but ingest, and not unalive get the vermilion bond on around down the leak the sun might fall on through to the other other.

Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Complex Syntax

A man on a bus thinks: I can make a sentence out of this: Language, he says, is an affliction passed from dark room to dark room. It spreads and corrodes and taints and turns an act as graceful as it is unseen into an enterprise of risk & failure; our accidents grow up to become children. Our children, when we have moved at half-life into a furnished room, will pity us. A complex sentence, he says, is the coupling of sentences, together meaning more than either could, a creature now with two backs, one hanging unfocused like a dirty ape onto the end, aping a thought, and the other, chiding away such breathtaking simplicity.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

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The Transience of New Leaves is Not As Noticeable as Plum Blossoms The Skins of the plums she brought home were the color of an intimated dawn. The meat, a bright dusk, and sour, pinched her eyebrows together and curved her lower lip. Coming Upon a Street Dog in the Alley Between the Lanes a full well of animal fear, giving off the odor of blind striking back. His eyes were muddy sockets of grey jade— Playing Chess with My Father After His Stroke Before he moves the piece to mate me, his hand— the hand is the instrument of the hollow which opens at our backs— rests on the crowned figure almost immaterially and his eyes move to meet mine, and I nearly smack the soapstone to pieces on the floor.

Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

We Burn There are bowls on our windowsills. Bowls of clear broth, never boiled or broken— insoluble domes of oil, a whole carcass in the pot, slices of unpeeled ginger, a lemon maybe— some moments we want to unzip our hot stomachs onto the subway floor, or tumble. hands outstretched, for the third rail which will allow us to regain light speed— steam lifts off the surface of the broth. Deep in the bowl, the heat is churning the liquid invisibly, fields of oil coil and separate. The spoon is coated with it, lively and bright going in, coated like plasma coming out.

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

Yellow If I may compare great things with small, A lemon is a funny canary. Like a Eucharist wafer, a shallow Gold dish called patina carries the sun, A Dutch gilder, a soft pile of arsenic. In the cool humid lands to the North, The soil is leached of its bases in Increase of acid, bile, gall, yellow-green, Melancholy. From the Danube in the West, the Melanchlaei, the Black Cloaks, Melanoma, the black growth, cut with A knife as thin as a postage stamp and Tapped into a clean glass dish colored Like a spark, the Androphagi lived further North beyond where lay uninhabited Desert. The winter sun, an ash covered Gleed in the gloaming a few notches off The horizon. The falling excrement Of wild honeybees contaminated By a fungal toxin, yellowdog, Yellowsheet felon, felonious Old World daisy. In yellow rain, the ember Glowing with breath shall glint. Tawny Krishna! Tawny Krishna, my gleg exception At your gleefully jaundiced gloat, young As you are, avatar, will blaze On the hide of the First Cow in the skyLess world of ice, probably yellow Metals, bright materials, made piled-up. On the blown bough of the tree man was made From, a yellowhammer, yellow-shafted Flicker, glistens less bird and more flame, Coal made yellow through age & use. The gold dish grace is brought forward on, Gilt favor, as genuine as the

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Poems by Ryan Scott Nance

yellow-jacket irises of a half-Manx grey-striped house tiger. Her glib smile half-slid off the sill. As honest as gold, as purchasable as what may be bought with gold. Mercenary. Turntail. Cad. An antibiotic administered Against ringworm of the heart, the courage Blue-grey, mottled, dappled in the dusk’s Yellow glass, gloss, image made on lightSensitive silver-coated metallic plates. Impervious reportage, yellowing. Tinctorially heroic & hallowed.

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