PROXIMITY

There is an archive of symbols between us

Clear weather dissolving on a complicated form

To have been writing poems at night

To believe in the future as a fixed geography

To have seen its trajectory in detail

To know even a long pattern eventually repeats

To understand departure from a mathematical perspective

A voice enters the instrument only in looking away

What moves us most arrives separate from the body

A card drawn invariably is fixed to its moment

TO BE DRAWN

I took a burnt wick and drew the shape of a star

Smudged, it retained its original darkness
A container obsolesced
As an enmity grew between an object and its evidence

I call language
And sometimes, it comes

To be kept, we have to turn information
Into a memory

Which is why we once tried to eat what we thought
Was precious, a coin, a perfect plastic shoe, dark dirt

I take a jar down to the beach

To capture some wild air

*

To know the truth of contact:

A perforation drawn down the day
Between autumn and winter

Two hands pressed together, kept apart
By the invisible space between molecules

Imagine a glass pane in place
Of that pressure, and it becomes real

I promise to be noble in my practice

Remembering bear traps hidden under leaves
I walk unarmed into the field

There is a malice inherent to a lawn

October’s blue insect floating down from a white sky

*

I step outside and into
My image’s outer velocity

An acorn maintained beneath my heel
Breaking the laws of physics

Orange streetlights on orange trees
Laugh in their dark outfits

At the bus stop, Mars draws a slash across the early hours

It was too much equating
Some things to other things...

I watch a music video montage

One thousand paintings of sailboats
On a loop of rhythm-synced crossfades

*

A projector slide of birch twigs
Arranged to form a hole

Cast a gray net of light over the room’s white folding chairs

In the atrium, I blowtorched a spoonful of beeswax
To melt into a plaster mold

Art takes longer, as the proverb says
But likewise shortens life

Emily opened a bottle of wine with a drill
And a stranger kicked over

An open box of T pins
I used to display my insect

I close an image with the flat side of some charcoal

*

A laser falling over the heart

On the sidewalk was an act of benevolence

Toward the body as a room, unlocking

Evidence from its object, the distance between
Origin and place

A candle burnt out on the porch
In the dry season, it felt powerful

To be cut down in defense of something owned

I know my way through
The hard boundary mistaken for bone

To be drawn is to be selected

With an eraser, I can carve you out of the dark

Jennifer Valdies is a poet from California currently living in Western Massachusetts. With Hunter Larson & Allie McKean, she edits Little Mirror, a critical archive and biannual journal of poetry. Work can be read now or soon in Annulet, b l u s h, FENCE, mercury firs, and elsewhere.