Matthew Moment
After
Minnesota trout have flown from river-boundedness
into the icy wind of oxygenate bliss,
feeling the sunlit miasma of their new world
above the brown bears husking empty shells in their fur:
part of this cyclical jubilee, and harmless.
Fickle black ravens purr like diasporic cats
with a cheer inexplicable, but not misplaced. No—
saturnal fathers still
speckle-spot the night sky like ornaments
of a grand, expensive nursery,
playing with an animalness of their own
for the audience of a peopleless world.
Not a one has wondered where they’ve gone
but the dogs—they whine today.
The long contended shimmer of animal musk
slowly and surely invades empty homes,
caterpillars waft through the erect spaghetti
of unkempt lawns. This is earth winning.
Verdigris fill sidewalk gaps and geese
perch on suburban gutters; gas station signs
spin until their heat-death.
The homeostasis of this universe goes unchanged
as if an ego-blow has been purposefully dealt
by the heavens unto a perished man.
Iconography, like Warhol, is eroded
by the sedimentary waters of animism—reset.
The fish find Red River again.
Despite the novelty of new molecules,
they have their home. All this may happen
because the pressure has been lifted.
Pressure, like air, is invisible and heavy.
Nobody scares at loons’ moonlit tutti tonight;
out from the cry, silence falls over the echo lake.
It is dark. Water laps ashore in demure flirts—
this is no more an end than a beginning.
Forward tides the great mandala.
Where I’d Gone
Hello to grasslets, goodbye to the ceramic
bowls of soup that kept me warm
through wintertime in Hungary.
I eat, so gluttonous
and want to have my cake, too.
If the walls could talk, they’d
say: You never listen. So I listen.
And jazz has not a thing to do
with my own choice to leave. I think that
love affairs are too straightforward, yes—
without a littering
of flats or sharps or syncopation.
Life is a big band, but love’s an
orchestra. The link between
the wood, the burn, the warmth is not so lost on me.
Yes, I lived in a warm house
during the wintertime. Hello to grass.
I haven’t been to Wales when it is warm out, but—
I imagine it’s something like this:
a sky of perfect pedigree
and grass-squares quilting over chocolate boxes
full of lambs, bleating. The lambs stand in for
patters of my new heart beating. Maybe
I must be in love, no matter what the cost.
There are worse fates. Example: there’s the fate
of the Hungarian
whose house I left unoccupied, except
some groceries in the fridge, some ice in the freezer,
some pages in the wastebin &
a note upon the table telling where I’d gone,
left folded by a tiny FM radio playing Mingus.
Matt Moment is an actor and poet based in New York. He will graduate from SUNY New Paltz in the spring.