Poetry: Adam Fagin

Lush Minimalisms


            broken



            light






                        *






            broken



            light



            clearing






                        *






            broken



            light



            crossing



            openfield






                        *






            changing



                        light



            entering



                        my



            field



                        of vision






                        *






            trading



                                    wet grass



            with



                                    evening



            light



                                    I look



            away



                                    as rain



            aims for



                                    its image






                        *






dark tipped whether



                        flowering gust



crossing parenthetical twilight



                        a minimal sky listens



with collapsed reverence



                        it listens in configurations



of silence interior to trope



                        clover couplet figure thought














My Second Dream of Wildness



thorny discourse

centripetal shade–

wait outside the rosebush



in the bucolic

rustle of metaphor














Day is Not a Forest


I walk to the park at dusk. What about

my thoughts that enter it when I’m gone?



Between literary meadow and urban sprawl,

I start with a lush minimalism. Waking up



late spring, I imagine dappled branches on

bedroom wall as advertisement for the soul.



I imagine my soul as passing planetary lust.

Absorbing love or boredom, personal or public



loss, every step fills my head with mourning

doves, dissolving codes of memory and



time—other selves in anti-narrative,

perambulatory and lost. Is their presence



apparition or apprehension? What appears

or as it does? In caesura’s interminable



shadow, a ground both figurative and literal,

the future comes and goes with regular frequency.











image1Adam Fagin’s recent chapbook is THE SKY IS A HOWLING WILDERNESS BUT IT CAN’T HOWL WITH HEAVEN (Called Back Books 2016). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New American Writing, Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Seattle Review, Volt, Fence, and many other journals. He is working on a book of lyric essays about family, home, the intersection of personal and public history, and Cotopaxi, an abandoned 19th-century Jewish agricultural colony.