Conjunctions:35 American Poetry: States of the Art

Three Poems
The following appears with two additional Palmer poems in Conjunctions:35.
 
Stone
 
What of the wolfhound at full stride?
What of the woman in technical dress
and the amber eye that serves as a feral guide

and witness
to the snowy hive?
What of the singer robed in red

and frozen at mid-song
and the stone, its brokenness,
or the voice off-scene that says,

Note the dragonfly by the iris
but ask no questions of flight,
no questions of iridescence?

All of this
and the faint promise of a sleeve,
the shuttle’s course, the weave.

What of these?
What of the century, did you see it pass?
What of the wolfhound at your back? 

Michael Palmer is the author of The Promises of Glass and Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (both New Directions). His contribution to a multiple collaboration with the painter Gerhard Richter was published by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Richter 858.