h o m e........

p a s t   i s s u e s....

s u b m i s s i o n s....

l i n k s

CHAD SWEENEY

BEING USEFUL

After the election 
some of us felt lost, wandered out 
onto the runway and lay down.
Airplanes rolled over us, landed 
and departed. We began to glow.
We began to flatten and line up.
It was the least we could do

POLLEN

Then a small contentment 
gave way 

to a vast contentment,
pollen sifted down 

yellow and blue, 
sea anemone nesting 

in the mountains, 
I was carrying a question 

about the social order 
and two questions about doubt.

Night was making something 

asymmetrical like smoke,
a conspiracy of birch and coal barges, 

I could hear the air 

arrange itself into ladders,
finch chicks sparked matches 

in the awnings 
with their hunger, 

I felt like committing treason.

I could discern limits 
to the invisible

but the visible redeemed us

LISTENING

Suddenly I was aware 
my feet wanted to be wings, 
and my hands wanted to be eyes.

It had been so all along.

My wrists hoped to be hip joints, 
and my jaw, to become a rib.
It was tender and astonishing 
so I held myself and wept.

Nothing in history was my fault. 
It had all been forgiven. 
Curtains sloughed off their inertia, 
the ashtrays suddenly gleamed. 

I was thinking of a borderless soccer pitch 
of vermillion grass and buffalo, 
the players loped over hills, each in his own 
private rapture. 
                            The wind 
was traced in platinum, and the sky 
was listening

CODA

A bird of sound 
immune to the weather 
nested near my childhood.

Somebody made it on the glass anvil.

I deliver the mud each spring,
jonquils along the highways.
 
The clock hand completes its revolution 
in exactly one minute.

A dead angel passes on the road. 
My old dumb dog doesn’t even bark.