JOHN RUFO | THREE POEMS

Falling, Leaves of Absence

dreamt I was lost downtown
by peter hujar: someone takes

a portrait and someone else
came out, bubbles or ice

or pleasant acid. I was duped
and deposed, but they kept me

on for another season. Deposits
didn’t come and went, glacial cash.

They sawed off the mountain top
and put people inside. The land

changed and changed and changed
became fire fire fire fire fire and

outside was inside of my neighbor’s
place. I didn’t know any naming.

I was a languid. I layered in winter
since the daguerreotype sealed.

Snapped shut into some stupor
wishing it was fantasy instead

of doubt, I couldn’t peel back
skepticism and only listen, as simply

breathing in the world occupies time
and space. Erosion coordinates.

But I’m not just air, still water too.
I’m a robin’s egg blue ready to hatch

and clouds break like fragmented
cooking. Which one wasn’t held?

Which one didn’t catch? We’ll take
another one, we’ll talk soon, we’ll get along

for a little while, we’ll be there in a few minutes.
Festival of taking days off, patron saints of sleeping in

Excerpt from Contact Print

I’m a ship of fools to want you. Love is like a faucet, facing its own hydrating burn. I want to be, and,
in being, evil, little old me, which is which, is whishing, is wishing, is what were you? And when were
you? I want to be scared with you, I want to be scarred like you, even if it can never be burned in me,
but maybe it can be buried, half deep, the rocks are drunk and heavy with sleep. Like minerals un-
stolen. Recycling not for re-using but to put it back where we started from. I like to imagine layers of
sediment bickering back and forth with one another. Less silt personified; more persons siltified
without dying. That’s the trick, isn’t it? Not ticking off natures’ nest of boxes, to say we’re done with
that; instead to impeach time itself, to oust our days, to undo any notion of the known we have: to say goodbye for now

(if I let it go) my mind doesn’t take the music; the music takes my mind. To be careful about what
hurts, care; hate and love were never separate (but it’s easy to say that), not that there isn’t always
ugliness elsewhere; as if the ugly and beautiful systems dawned were even possible to unwind from
one another, in their relay becoming reminder, so that every true thing finds a false thing perched on
its shoulder

Mutiny, Motley

In the four billionth year of melting
no freedom sang a song in the street
and street-song itself was molting
for old and new feathers moving, slept
in or on the old open floor, creaking
with mulling transparent ghost feet.
Do ghosts even know they are ghosts, thinking
of themselves as themselves? Or agents
of some dimension without subjects, minding
a past without tending, a future without
tendering fares. Boats sail and are capsizing
by the blaring, barking, blink of capital’s threat
found silent or absent on trial and believing
a trial was even here to solve or was meant
to stop the melting. Grain again malting
until grain gives without a sigh or comment.
Would it be anyone but the buried to threshing
the ground that has been thrashed, sung into
like a song pronouncing violence and its ending
also, a sick splintering of conclusion into start
into marketplace corner where the sea was sitting
down as salt. In the four billionth year of kept
going, some routines were ongoing, interrupting
the calm and careful complexity of already sent
and still action. An inspiration to treat dancing
as aspiration and preparation for movement’s silt.
Without becoming fisherman or critic, believing
instead in constant rotation of activity, spent
the identity; and allowed the elaboration bearing
out of these geometries to angle and be bent
into blessed commotions on insurgent evasions