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Michael Loughran
Tuesday
The Histories
Eventually Everything Would Happen
A Curiosity of Trees
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Tuesday
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To be a collector of trivia
relayed over the phone
to a friend, to rise up
into something
unaware! To read the review
of “Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s Inferno”!
To think about
the movie about the
movie never
made! And
about the bar
that isn’t a bar
but used to be!
How it became
an empty upright pie slice
with a half-extant
two-colored cornice!
On a street
called an Avenue!
And the city garbage can
and its plastic grocery bag
and its dead bird!
To watch the river
lift up two boats
and put them back!
To smell the motorcycled air!
To have an idea
for the name of a band
or a child!
To be worn by
reality like a jacket!
To pick you up
and to be rich!
To see a tree
shaped like a megaphone,
or a hat shaped
like a hat-shaped tree,
or a blade of grass
folded in thirds
left atop a picnic table!
To hear baseball small talk
on the radio on the floor!
To feel the hot gloom
of these four clouds!
To tell you everything
as soon as possible!
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The Histories
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I was doing some underlining,
I was looking hard into the beginning of history,
I was looking hard into Arion the harpist
who fled the pirates and jumped ship
and was carried off by a dolphin,
I was in the kitchen with one page of Herodotus,
I was thinking about Arion, or not thinking of Arion really,
I was underlining, or not really underlining
but thinking of underlining, or thinking at least
about pencils, and thinking of Arion,
and I was thinking I guess about the best parts,
how they kept squirreling past me,
and I was thinking about who I could tell about Herodotus
and what I could tell them about Arion who fled the pirates,
Arion who jumped ship, who was carried off by a dolphin,
but I knew at the end of it all nobody cares
and there was nobody to tell,
“there was nobody to tell nothing”
and I knew it was just me and Herodotus,
me and one page of Herodotus,
one page of not even underlined Herodotus,
already half-forgotten Herodotus, Herodotus in one ear
and out the other, in one eye and out the other,
Herodotus in the breeze, Herodotus vacui,
and I wanted to be left alone, and I thanked god
I was alone.
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Eventually Everything Would Happen
—Paul Bowles
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Half a funeral home would burn,
and somewhere, all of a portico and part of a dormer.
A couple accidents involving old dogs,
one or more occurrences of an unlikely temperature
in January, or in July.
Some oddly unmistakably familiar thing
would settle on and become something else—
a cloud over a white barn,
diagonal rain into lake water.
Every best thing would be said, or nearly said.
The half sequiturs of gossip
would manifest a forest.
The horizon would have a horizon.
I would be jealous of myself.
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A Curiosity of Trees
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I found seventy-five
deer-shaped clouds
that nobody noticed
and I tucked everything
else under a bench.
Church bells divided
hour from hour,
invisible geese leaving
the tops of trees
where a siren became
a memory and I
was saved
by the twin compulsions
to call the sun
a neckless head of fire
and a necklace’s yellow center.
There was barely one thing
I could have said I knew.
Two planes introduced
themselves crosswise
into the same unlucky cloud
which was all there
was, all there was
was to watch trees
dangle into the dirt,
all there was was to watch
money floating in
the pockets of others,
little green birds
with vertigo.
All there was was to watch
a horse watching
the yellow-white rain
that turned everything
everywhere
yellow-white, to watch
something dumb
and sublime and irresistible
and mine lifting into the sky.
Into the shadows of the
afternoon I stood
because I stood because
I stood.
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