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Gustaf Sobin

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Shadow Rattles (II)

1

(ars poetica)

a breath nail
being beaten into   air ( at the   very end
     of numbers, having run
out of earth, water,   light)
                                      this     wedging-where.


2

    are ourselves, turned in-
side   out (it might have been     our deaths we’d
    been talking about, so   careful

how we   touched, told one another   what we did).


3

the secret   ‘between’
          gets told over and over, without
ever   being revealed (in white
half-wheels, thins

to these hissing salts,
         and this breath of     ours, ground backwards).


4

          are us, the others, except
for those oily shadows that we’ve cast out over
          them (and thus
made love to ourselves, our frail in-
verted vacuity); is image, what

          we’ve moved through
and suffered from, nothing else: from idea, idealis.


5

          was nothing further, and still moving (wind-
                       shots, and the
floppy-hatted shadows of the     staved vines), to tell:

tell one another   what we’d never heard, ourselves;
(while the selves rushed   through their bunched wires).

(1979)

 


Gustaf Sobin is an American poet living in France these past 15 years. His first major publication as a poet was only 5 years ago in the pages of the New Directions Anthology #32. His first book WIND CHRYSALID’S RATTLE was published in 1980 by Montemora as a supplement to the excellent magazine of that name. (Montemora, magazine and supplements are distributed by the New York State Small Press Association. In Great Britain try to order via Nick Kimberley or Alan Halsey.) He has also published a children’s book, THE TALE OF THE YELLOW TRIANGLE, with Braziller (New York, 1973). His second collection of poems will appear during 1981.

 

Page(s) 61-63

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