Sophie Strand is the author of two chapbooks: Love Song To A Blue God (Oread Press) and Fifteen Promises of Our Lady (Metambesen). Her poems have been published by Entropy, Your Impossible Voice, Persephone's Sisters, and The Doris.
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The Debris of a Shape
Like the muscles of Magritte’s sky, ether churning within walls,
like breath cornered in a lung buoys up although the mouth is shut,
or as the mountain pass is so misted that it becomes its own weather,
like so, and words roll from their objects, press the ground, bruised.
Inconceivably, although the ancient calendars assure us,
the subject of the poem threatens, but does not arrive.
We walk blind, one foot in and one out. Of what? The what
is propositioned somewhere beyond the cliff’s lip.
And the entirety snowballs, white accumulating white
as, in the dawn, the memory of the dream erases the dream.
Things rip apart. The animals are flayed; the jaguar is torn.
Furless, the parts work without touching. A clause is surprised
that it depends on absence. Like a murder without its
woman, the victim is the bloodied floor inside a closed line.
This vibrates within the debris of a shape.
Neruda looses the pulley and it remains itself.
Magritte’s clouds stay clouds, overflow the center.
This is the poet’s duty: to shake the word roughly so that the joints
dislocate, and bones collide within a fixed space; and yet
retains its letters: animal, form, finally, injured within bounds.
Like the muscles of Magritte’s sky, ether churning within walls,
like breath cornered in a lung buoys up although the mouth is shut,
or as the mountain pass is so misted that it becomes its own weather,
like so, and words roll from their objects, press the ground, bruised.
Inconceivably, although the ancient calendars assure us,
the subject of the poem threatens, but does not arrive.
We walk blind, one foot in and one out. Of what? The what
is propositioned somewhere beyond the cliff’s lip.
And the entirety snowballs, white accumulating white
as, in the dawn, the memory of the dream erases the dream.
Things rip apart. The animals are flayed; the jaguar is torn.
Furless, the parts work without touching. A clause is surprised
that it depends on absence. Like a murder without its
woman, the victim is the bloodied floor inside a closed line.
This vibrates within the debris of a shape.
Neruda looses the pulley and it remains itself.
Magritte’s clouds stay clouds, overflow the center.
This is the poet’s duty: to shake the word roughly so that the joints
dislocate, and bones collide within a fixed space; and yet
retains its letters: animal, form, finally, injured within bounds.