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MAXWELL GONTAREK



LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE


In the secret century blood was said
                to be spilled metaphor
Sometimes it was drained into an enjambment
                distributing and returning experience
                at its border zones
                sometimes a flap of wings
                where your head is
                under trees

Exactly distributed the articulation of desire is a moment
It’s as modern as irreconcilability
                  or a return to the convertible
Lap
                  say
                  the typographic bend at which
                 anticipation and recollection
                 refuse to manifest anything
                 and surge on hollow
Slag
                 esque
                 “later”
                  and its “long ago”

There are stranger dints
                in the heraldic
                immobility of things
They bleed plane straw

As syllable this function would flower a note otherwise indestructible
Everything that’s living in the bump of air sings
                    back
Back


Phot bend
                   lapped
Fielded even
In turn

Some conformity of language experienced in its relativity as absolute
                   which would cover the distance from one point to another
                   without solving it
The air worn out by our gestures
See these
                        petals
                        that she wears on the back of the earth?
They do it to themselves
They’re open margins
Who would answer the following

What is the most appropriate to the human bell?
White lake
                            con if
                             re
                            main dure
                            “1”

Rough houses crop up in acreages
Those we say are not our humanisms

On which hollowness goes to work by not working itself through

Petal backward
The tow
What emits of an echo
            its congenital opacity
A rain followed by a circumflex


I am glued to this ease
                “with which”
Austerity becomes quality
                  all by itself

Fine volve sonance
Side sist li
                    and eff

What meant
What paved
The motes you saw were knuckles
This is how music works too
The scurry under the nails
                      our residual
                      green shell
                      would ease
                      into clear fold
                      if we could hear it
The cream under the carpet
                      and in our ears
                      small moving hairs

––––


LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE

The secret of our century is song
            has become a double gallows
Sand
            the reflection of a building
            in its burning
The path of the paragraph
            the “ea” in the sea in the breast
Occupations “occupation” precludes
Lead

Still pretty country
Pretty colon
Surest
              sickle shaped
              para areas
              where we meet as analogies
How have you possibly been?

Derives
              from the sphere
              and represents its overturning

As a theory of sheafs stirs for the decreased leaf
               from where you sit
               a sac of course
                (sic)s
                the third messenger
                1/3 away
                as an embossment
                the bare ones
                buoy
                on an arc without a tangent

On pain of
                the fact in ever increasing variance with the state
                “with” leaves
But a night hears other sounds
The prepositions never lacking
                because never yet imagined

Blank Dorothy wood
Shine like the moon
                the water wanes
                with leaves
You can destroy propriety this way
Don’t cry
    
Being “ring”
                as a preposition
                just touches the middle of color

We were inveigled into a shared memory
                which was exhausted in its fallout
                for hermetic purposes
Verbal “there”
Feel the chair
What everything around you pulls toward its perceptive marrow
What forgot

Only the page is an end of nothing on top of another nothing

The lowing in the animals in the gorge in its lace
                of green
                called be
The transparency of nerve and the transparency of curve
A skein a clear parity of “just touches”
A speech act that represents a vowel
                as that which exists prior to the world
                and ignites the hairy comets

You will remember the teeth
Every farewell has teeth

––––

LATTICE AFTER YOUR ADVICE

The whole is a deep green gnawed 50%
All our love in spite
            thanks to
            noun sec’s
            care moss
            con Alagon
            stratus and
            the secret police in the sun

It’s time to forget your hand
            the pile of strings
            the letter from the foundation
            the plastic home
            appliance
“Montrer”
            demonstrating
            “go inside a money
            that would be my way”

There’s a stain unbeneath inert that the air trembles
One seems to the other
To will
            my my gorse
            or furze
So so
            a low lovat

“I need to renew my chasms” is what you say
            when you’re playing for keeps
After the lam of evenings after the conjunction in “credit or belief”
This obligation persists like headlights in a field far off
It gets so that you forget to dream you die of shoulders

In the last century contemplation alone could reveal a true evening
            the lowercase letter that has no discernible significance
            the clock or sound of it that never indicated conjuncture
            whence arose the emanation or flight of the real
            its becoming marked by two poles
            flash and fold
My bolt inheritance
My bombing sedimentary hemisphere
The inflorescence or tassel also known as arrow
            each couple thousand flowers consist in
            spokes
Data
            malignant infinite sanction
Green inadvertency

“If only this could be bodied forth as music” I thought as I lost 300 pounds
            just by having some Poinciana on in the background

Viaje magueys
And the dice
            horn
“The very fabric” commences
            solar barges
            simulacrums of anybody’s evening
            peaceable namely
            comely
Company
            wanting to know if the dimensions can be reformulated
            is a way of asking for a little extra future
            wanting to know to what lengths
            is a mesh sedge

This is for you
            for whom exile felt like vacation
            because of the music that played

You thought it would be enough for us to have a quick shower in the arch iris
We could dry ourselves off with some stratus
So as not to
Get back to the skin
The tonnage of faces
            in that beloved beneath
            that maybe emancipated
The meaningful wear
            of cover of cower

That evening headlights descended from the trees
That evening in the prefab din
            bleating
            the orphan of articulation
            was reduced to the future
That evening nouns became the adjectives of being offered
            became legal
            became tender
That evening wind settled in a singular poplar
That evening levelled with me

You can stand against perspective like it’s the wind
You can be the tree in its shirt at the gates of every evening
Whatever you decide
            I will drink from your source only
You will be my only falsehood

––––

Maxwell Gontarek has poems out in Lana Turner, Coma, αntiphony, La Lancha, Volt, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. Co-translations with Léa Fougerolle into/from French can be found in verseant. His chapbook, H Is the Letter of the Door, is forthcoming from above/ground press and his pamphlet, A Perfect Donkey, is forthcoming from Creative Writing Department. He has lived in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Belgrade, Langres, and Lafayette, Louisiana.