Eleven Poems

Laynie Browne

All the Salt in the Sea Originated in Rocks and Minerals

The wolves I met were courteous, but also remote
in the post apocalyptic mushrooms blush
kangaroo rats kick sand at snakes following star-minded
lesions—saying nothing with entrails exposed
Contours of the day turn and embrace

Archimedes Met His Death on the Seashore While Making a Geometrical Drawing in Sand

Every few hours whine and paw
Volcanic winter, amygdala
Dead birds tell tales
Soot preserved on feathers
tucked into drawers
near spruce, oak or birch
Fly agaric laced with milk

Sea Water Exhibits a Dark Blue Color in Deep Regions, Lighter Greenish Blue in Shallows

Pour liquids over the body
Boil liquids into her body
into the silence she becomes
waif, monolith, endless roads
Cloud-gold-dust larger than earth

Cake Ice, Growlers, Brash, Floes, Sludge

Perforations in the probable city
dropstones, crystal lattice, drumlins
Emerge from soil—lacustrine egg
glacial milk, loess thoughts audible

Other Studies Can Be Made from the Drifts

Don’t follow form or fitting
In body succumb

Marry circumstance to fiction
Read yourself from rivers (fail / flail)

Your name is collage
I’ve lost my place
(as if my job were to dress glaciers)

The Current May Take on a Kind of Rotary Motion Defined by Two Quantities

For work in fabric borrow hands

Sew cloak of recognition

Divine meltwater

Draw up hood embossed with eyes

Measured by the Direction from Which the Wind Blows

Bodice learns
she turns her clothes to birds
bequeaths weaving

Tentacled silence
unhooks eyes wherein
redness is leverage

Mauve signals catch
wind notes on
abandoning a dress

Glow Is Due Mainly to the Presence of Dinoflagellates

Stacks of profanity dry on newspaper
while light disappears from eyes
voices green unguarded

cradle wolves or walk
into symphonies repeatable
by virtue of technology

The wolves and the walking
and the sun falling are never

facsimiles though they resemble
their sisters

In the Southern Hemisphere: Reverse the Words “Right” and “Left”

Not mistaking the moon’s face for human
alchemical companion how to embody
the actual instead of spending
the emptiness between eyelashes

Nothing to ask the oracle
pulsing mountain—intuition

How to extract self
forget iron, recline
in vast unstapled
looking-cloth—lung

The Mechanics of an Illusion

Surface is froth
as faces throng
Decocted sense is
not what we see

Coupling of clouds
form a frame of
scalloped empty sky

Refraction Is Observed When Light Travels from One Medium to Another

In ember days umbel
thin hooks cluster

Silted skies and falling gray
You stop to wind, to thread

Trail tulle, rustle
listen as filaments
retrieve spinning

Spindle swerves
and we

Such small stone trees
ethereal harbors

Strung from pendant eyes