Manifest

Twelve thousand versions of twelve dozen ivy blossoms
in the compound eye
                                                    of a dragonfly 

                             Shoulder-wide
crevice opens above a gravel run
                                                      bottles
             and a condom we decided
not to touch             
part of the preserve 

                                          Grove of future dirt
surrounds a cluster of brightly-
clothed children                              One
                                               as they say
                                        is mine

Near the scout shelter along the tracks
a woodpecker harvested termites
from the decaying limb of an Ash
                                                           Sawdust
                                                      sprinkled over
                          the sumac’s beseeching leaves
Idea’s that
we’re getting what birds are just doing?
                           Who drew that
   white line

                                             on the sky?
                         Mine’s spied
the day’s first vapor trail—
passenger plane on the hop to Chicago
                                                              By nine
                                                  it’s diffused
                 combined with others of its kind
and high cirrus    
                               One white charge
snaps through made weather

                                 Twelve thousand versions
                    of twelve dozen blossoms
in the compound eye




Poem with Hard Thinking
 
Maybe birds are complaining
in the junk Elm along the trestle.
Singing is just an idea.

It's not sick to think this way.  Relax.
In art class I used pudding
to paint mountains.  In Phy. Ed.
I showered in my clothes.

Now I'm inventing bird therapy
where trains pass—they're so fast because
the world swelled and everything's farther.

A fast train can only end the fizzle
sizzle inside a bad birdy. 
The little bird body goes on
pinned to the outbound express.





Poem After People Die

Squinting up in the dim last of it
I think I recognize the makings
of the new nest in the Lilac

Clothing torn off an old mannequin
(not a mannequin but I can’t say the body’s name)
shredded by starlings          starlings
beyond a wire fence                    know a figure
gone cold                starlings know dead
            and fake

I recognize this feeling: indignant
When did these rights concepts open in me?
Got to feeling like something         someone         just because
I like it doesn’t
mean it’s supposed to keep existing

One hard fall winter spring
everyone’s someone dies and everyone
smiles through but it’s crazy smiling

Gets dark    birds stop    every single night
I read letters in the orange recliner                 (letters can
The boy comes down                               spell knot in
out of sleep                                                   a way that means no
making lovely sounds                              tangled and bound)
like swim swim and smiling in
two worlds

I’ll try to sleep                try to remember new summer
at the public pool               everyone’s new standing
at the edge the water really              is blue and you
really can go                                down in the cold and open
                                                                         see


 

William Stobb lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  In summer of 2006, he attended the Summer Literary Seminars program in St. Petersburg, and appears in the author photo near the program's hotel, where he roomed with the Kenyan journalist and fiction writer, Tony Mochama, the greatest man...Stobb swears.  William Stobb's book, Nervous Systems, is a National Poetry Series selection for 2006, forthcoming from Penguin in June 2007.