Two Poems
Driving to Dec—
delta-like outpost
south of here
sun spathe on fields
deciphered at last
dear nothing, dear prayer
more scantness
grid of little displaced
there was audience, there is brave
like a microscope or roulette
we escaped but can’t
go and everyone knows
Small Air
Antioch Hotel
where trains pause in the lobby a strange attractor for debris
blanched
airpocket hotel its
bodies fall to the street
in a guttering flock
and you not caring a voice
is thrown from the walls always
you besieged, besieged hear the name Antioch/Antakya
how the museum recast that lost
ancient city & all you could do
was sit & drink in
the bar: called Halite Bar the rim of a glass salty
& think of halite rock
its concoidal fractures millionfold
a seam beneath you.
Stare, drinking hear how the crusader Princes of Antioch were emptytitled in the end.
How the Antioch Chalice was not used at the Last Supper.
•
If you sink an object in Lake Erie
it will emerge beaded, a bonediamond. Someone’s skull a spiderweb, imagine—
hard as the pavement trace of white outside
and downtown shuttered, its
centre all dug out & instead
a countercross/score of limbs/lines on the
real skyline and numbness a numb pale scoria lifting/falling
and still so hard that Antioch, Ohio
was the last same place before now. And you sat in the same way, same hotel
in the vitreous luster of you (yourself, sitting)
in a lean-to room with a touchup and half-grey smile—
(What a battle what a bad winter a bad journey)
To vacant shapes in rocksalt cordless faces on the wall.
Jane Lewty
