3 Poems
Greg Purcell
YOU DIED UNHAPPILY IN THE PEACE
(Antonymical poem, after Ilya Kaminsky)
But now you financed your own park, you
slept
for eight hours, you capitalized us to within
our potential. You are
on my roof, above my roof Gaza
is rising: visible park by visible park by visible park.
You took to bed, back to the fireplace.
Three years
The wondrous anarchy near the park of capital
near the driveway of capital near the farmland of capital near the collective of capital,
Your sickly collective of capital, you (thanks a lot!)
died unhappily in the peace.
from OAK POEMS
White noise a mind
May a hyacinth month
June a daisy don’t
Give me away. Time
A rabbit. Yet here
In my car the month
Moves quietly the years
In the mirror like August
August November
Passengers in flight
Above me sing May
May December & death
—
Concrete adaptations
Of the death
Of Socrates, squirrel
Damaged resting in the crotch
Of a tree. Adaptations
Everywhere doubling
What is known. Death
A ringer. Flight
From my country, arms
And feet hanging
Out of trucks.
The spit of asphalt.
—
Strange word, host
To a parasite, welcome,
I will capture you in my body
As you capture my landscape,
my labor. Welcome welcome
Strange blood-rite bug,
Pharaoh swelling Architectures
Of gold, thing that crawls
Into moist sneakers.
Snails’ eyes swelling, pulsing
With fungus, standing fixed
for the predator bird.
—
Vacant lawn all day.
Rain pooling in cement,
Swelling in the cold
Fabric of the air
And splitting like wood
Beneath the hatchet.
New bills arrive, strangers
Fix my house in static
Mathematic sight, collude
With the weather, angle
To be made whole, my
House in parts.
—
If I behave perhaps
I will die well, die
Beloved, misremembered
As a good brother
A stalwart friend
Agonizer of bronze
Statuary, a cop against
Real vice. Dead brother,
Friend, agonizer O in fact
A compromise between
This feeling and that fact
True only to his fault
__
A simple vocabulary, a complex heart.
Palms pressed into the berth.
An audience with the queen
Before the guillotine of night,
The mind enmeshed,
its native corps unravelling
Grey into the grey fog.
Lightning behind the eye.
A stroke, then, in this happy
Home. There are projects
Left to be done in the kitchen.
A gap in the floor.
—
Cheap plywood, previous
To apartments cramped, weird,
Weirdly vacant. The finish peeling
Like wallpaper. Missing books
I sold between evictions,
Outrunning Illinois rain
And Massachusetts rot, books
I still think are there, like
Spirits rattling the lath
Behind the plaster.
Our new home.
So much is missing.
FAILURE UPON FAILURE
Failure upon failure, the finch lands,
Considers for a moment her precarity
And with a wide and swift surround
She leaves. The earth like a funnel
For which one’s feeble attention
Returns flabbergasted.
Greg Purcell is the author of The Fundaments (Poor Claudia, 2015) and chapbooks The New Music (Agriculture Reader, 2014) and More Fresh Air (with David Pritchard, Industrial Lunch, 2016). He hosted and curated a few reading series in Chicago and New York. Today, he works as the manager of a Wild Birds Unlimited in Kalamazoo, MI.