September 11, 2012

Four Poems

Jake Syersak

A Way to Wed No Toward

A coo is forming a dove from the open breast of zero: a sound, a rivulet, a note to wed no toward. Something along the lines of the question “glass?” is filling an empty drinking glass with the question that glass is. That this dove is a question of a bird, glossed, empty glassed, unseen, save by an utterance or the utter absence of. That I approach this evergreen, regardless, wherefrom the voice of dove first emerged is a “zeroing in on” hovering like a stream of foreign language from this evergreen, unseen. That this voice is the italic of the tree’s own vertigo, every vinho verde of its snow-laced foliage ajar. Something along the lines of an unseen dove overdubs an open “zeroing out of.” This is the absence that becomes the abscess of an opening. Here I am thinking, wryly, of an intestinal opening, awry: a sound, a rivulet, a note to wed no toward the faith that makes a line a curve, a curve a zero, and a zero nevertheless a zero on the fringe of a scoliosis of dove.


“Or a …” Is a Flight Away from Utter Absence

Wanting to say “the sound of this dove’s coo is synonymous with the cylindrical tusk of its neck” is equivalent to the refusal of oil & water to mix; nothing of this persuasion twists an esophagus into a balloon animal in the way of a phoenix, does it? The gist is that I’m curving the lines & sewing the last of its wings into a warp of je ne sais quoi how playing music into the awe of a mirror boils a mirror to oil. All the vibrato dove is I’ve raked across a table like a mess of hail. Messiah is the look-alike that happens, which of itself is “some sort of a bird,” a winging the valley of the shadow of déjà-vu. What’s the stutter of “or a …” without the flutter of wings, a flap of je ne sais quoi? A thought-feather soldered to the mirage of a sewing machine? A typing “some sort of bird,” a note to wed no toward as though a stroke of Wite-Out on the most exquisite text?


Even “Or a …” Has Its Origins

I am always most astonished by what of magnetry can never be soldered & why. A crushed dove, a zero, a coo floating in the evergreens to collide with any taxi to a quasi-constellation. One thing I don’t think I’ll ever forget is the first time I read André Breton describe his wife’s waist so beautifully as the shape of an otter, hourglassed between the perfectly aligned teeth of a lion. The sound of this is what thinking, postdated like his love was: a swarm of forysthia in the awe of yelling odd. Like this dove-coo in an evergreen is; like this suddenly a dove is; like a déjà-vu, a vortex of wings of je ne sais quoi, a wind from which mixes oil & water into a cocktail as logarithmically the spiral of a nautilus shell the axis of zero & missed concentric circles. What chaos is a dove to be the opposite of concentric. I’m throwing out all my old etiquette. That thought that dangles haphazardly from a tooth beginning as an “or a …” is now an aura, suddenly aurora borealis when we speak.


A Way to Project Away To

Logarithmic spiral over & over dove is over & over a zero through the carousel of déjà-vu. The sun Ferris-wheeling overhead like the symbol for degree rising in Fahrenheit is the utter oil of sun against an oceanic sky. A snow-white dove against the absent backdrop of a snowed-down field is only a degree of dove to a certain degree. This is an accurate depiction of memory: the spores of asymmetrical rhizomes combing through the intestinal labyrinth of magnetry. Or how a holograph works: to project away to, to wed no toward from an “or a …” to a wing of a nautilus shell in the vertigo of sky from. To unwinding the rhythm of a flight of film of oil on water from. To the peeling back the sky from. To what “I saw was” unwinding, from a stutter of a collision into “is a was.”

Jake Syersak is an MFA candidate at Florida Atlantic University. His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Front Porch, Housefire, Kill Author, and Word Riot.

(view contributions by Jake Syersak)