FEDERALIST
from bough
mouth,
clump or clod
the pose a lizard
lifts
a fire in
with wind
and eyes
there is my testimony
of
the phrase,
grass,
jolly gram
harboring my golden things
here rusting
dust
red dust aground
for this
locality, my apogee—
all points a cluster
trembling its working
liquid shining
dry and easy
friendly
arrowland
should arrow land astray —
in Santa Fe,
in all I do,
all I look through
I listen to —
at home
and what I am
the falling
leaf
in rank of oaks,
the jay with dryburn forest
on a vacant cinder cone
all things contribute to. . .
and mine the authorship —
to name what moves they make
the well the center of the storm,
whose eyes are plaine
the bird or what it was
to swallow like a snake
an atom from my hand
and land that is
and will be aquifer,
water piped cleanwhite
that while the snow
the river is
is in ellipsis. . .
what is West
what is So
what of Me
in the rye
times of terror,
. . . if eloquence is remedy?
I trust whiteflower flare
make my entire life
the straw after my life
my gist a feeling in me
how pinecones to seed
crow lands the branch enact
its time a winter squash
I listen I wait
akin to water like a duck
should write back I should be
the vellum or the graph
the ambush or
the transcript of these papers,
one person writes their name
one person answers
service done
to make a place
this dram,
this absentee and deed
and so writ down
my words are spoken for
the earth is store —
the bottom of
the walk
a garden on
its half below
ripe as it goes,
rise or blow
disburse
or hold
I am what is before me
my estate is overstock,
baron
of
the tower cell and font,
that language race ahead of it
across
the page the imprint
spreads onto the sacaton
west of Searchlight at 8:00pm,
a fireshard
light swallows
with its flare,
stones and stems
damp with
the desert rain
that in the west
is all one note,
Mojave shining that
tell me the name of this:
the yucca
thorn
the distance
debths,
those are my company —
of them to be
incumbent,
I,
of my own
purchase
of this place the full I am —
among the else
and distant hum
redundant with
the plume
writ down puccoon,
my mountain looms
to read must rust
in what
is reft
of center fissure
burr deserter
bandit
bloom
or cull,
or compact with no strings. . .
I spill my watchword in the stream
I score a feather with black ash
I document and draft
inhale
and down the slope
what I profess, annex, sound or vow
each thing lifts up from level
from its contract
and hiatus
where cold mountains shine
white spotty land behind
a walker’s lane,
and stepping out, then too my questions will. . .
Oscar is a poet and teacher from the American southwest. He grew up in Santa Fe, NM, and has hopped around in Spokane, Portland, Las Vegas, and Moscow. His interests in poetry include modernist and postmodernist writers such as Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Erin Moure, as well as global literatures and in particular Eastern European and Latin American traditions. In 2013, Oscar visited the Slovenia poet Tomaz Salamun in Ljubljana, and he has recently developed an appreciation for poets in the Spanish Baroque style such as Luis de Góngora and Sor Juana de la Cruz. He spends his free time hiking and walking — always on his feet.