The Shining Room
To survive chaos she inscribes
chaos, looking through
space this
shining flycatcher, oat grass
a line through fabric
wayward
name, a wild steadying
drawn tightly across
what fills
To see
what won’t go away
she lists
every false claim
extending her body in space
transparency after transparency
—H.T. Harrison
____
from Practicing Amnesia (Singing Horse Press, 2000) by Heather Thomas
The Room of Not-Knowing
There’s a bed, a lamp, a bureau,
the drawer filled with your socks.
You keep the corners clear
for piles of laundry, magazines.
You sit at the desk hunting
what you don’t know in words
unspooling filigreed patterns
laced like nests across an inner sky.
Someone carries the chair to the car.
When the nests fall
from the weight of their knots
you make new ones
or give up and construct a series
of shifting screens dark or light
depending on whether you
remembered to change the bulb.
Some have the translucence of pearls
or the wings of mating dragonflies.
The car carries someone to the chair.
You come through rain
before everything strung and fallen,
brief as photos, your chance
to live at the heart of the real
and to tell. You are perturbed
at the pronounciation of your name.
Sleeping above you the skeleton
dangles your writing hand from its ear.
The chair someone carries is a car.
—H. T. Harrison
Awakening
you are not your mind you are not your mind you are not
the poem is
not your body
is language an ocean we live coming to
forms proof
she was coming to
blank space where the body could be blank space
wave
curve ink
jet
wet wide open
thought lands wild (grief is simple and dark)
hard
to turn
away
turn into the one you want or each next enter the split
mount an enormous
struggle
with fictions
enormous
rushing past
will you be close
calm
utterly solitude
utterly
maple, moss
my plot is marvelous this fine gauze
conceals practices
hard careful digging hard careful digging hard
cold part
who
would imagine
life like
words
—H.T. Harrison
____
from Resurrection Papers (Chax Press, 2003) by Heather Thomas